Possibly a double whammy effect of been Hungarian and Jewish.
My partner is Hungarian and they put an emphasis on rigorous education across the board that we (in the UK or at least my part of it) don't.
Outside of the upper middle-class and above there is a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in England (I can't speak for the other member countries of the UK) and certainly the case in the working class schools I was educated in, you'd get bullied for been the class swot basically.
> My partner is Hungarian and they put an emphasis on rigorous education across the board that we (in the UK or at least my part of it) don't.
I wonder if this is an Austro-Hungary effect or a central Europe thing. Every country I know of that follows the German education system is considered to “put an emphasis on rigorous education across the board”.
Whenever we compare notes from my Slovenian schooling with American friends it seems like the US education system is a joke by comparison.
Although in official rankings we score lower so who knows. Maybe I just got lucky
I believe this is the average experience of most in Europe, I am Italian and I find the US (lower) education system worse than the Italian one too, and we score _terribly_ in all international rankings.
I believe it's probably a different distribution: european education is maybe flattened around the average, while in the US there is possibly a wider distribution.
It's called the prussian school model, focuses heavily on memorizing and lexical knowledge. But is very poor on teamwork and preparing you for real life. Prussian (German) society needed reliable factory workers so that's why school starts so early (7:30-8:00 AM) to pretty much condition children to get up early, be obedient and just focus on the job.
Any positive we had at a time comes from socialism’s general focus on education (one of the few positives of it) - eg. both Russian and Hungarian math education went up to differentiation/integration by the end of secondary school. It also had very extensive programs for talented students.
Unfortunately, currently we have seriously laughable pay for teachers (barely above the seriously laughable minimal pay), so we have a bunch of burnt out, old teacher with no motivation.
I don't know if this is common to all the Martians, but John von Neumann was home-schooled by private tutors/governesses until the age of ~10. No doubt he had a broad spectrum of intellectual talents, but his early development at least was based on a one-to-one pastoral footing, not a mass-education school system.
This is how education was traditionally done. If you can at all afford it, take your kid out of the public school system and either home school or find a good private school. In the age of the internet with so many learning materials online and the possibility of zoom tutoring by subject matter experts, it's never been easier to get a fantastic education.
The UK upper class is remarkably educated and unintelligent in my opinion. You meet lots of people in the UK in some strata of society who went to Oxford yet have never really been taught how to think.
UK research also appears to have largely fallen behind world leaders - see mRNA research coming from Germany/US yet the UK having no native knowledgebase of mRNA I know of and producing one of the weakest of the COVID vaccines.
