[ergot_vacation]

More accurate title: "California seeks to turn Math education into anti-white, anti-intelligence propaganda devoid of any connection to reality. Few remaining sane people in state protest fruitlessly."

These people are monsters. They're literally tearing apart civilization (education of children is foundational) for the sake of their doomed ideology. If you can't see the parallels to the Soviet Union, you're either already drinking the kool-aide or incomprehensibly dense.

[sershe]

To be fair to Soviet Union (I'm from USSR/Russia), they were actually the reverse in that area, there were gifted programs, gifted schools where you would be tracked if you were good, competitions for school kids in many subjects (from history to physics) that would also track you to gifted schools or could earn an automatic college admission, etc. AFAIK even the classes in regular run-of-the-mill schools would sometimes be "semi-tracked", with most of the smarter/better behaved kids ending up in some classes and the less smart/worse behaved kids in others for the same age group, without any other differences (i.e. lessons would be more or less the same). Soviet Union was an evil empire, but it was not entirely dumb.

The modern progressives, on the other hand, are evil AND dumb.

[nverno]

I feel bad for kids that will be the subjects of these social experiments. And if (when) the results aren't good, can you trust ideologically driven administrators to change their methods? [[it would be great if it ended up working well for the kids, but it's a huge risk especially at a public, state level]]

I was lucky enough to grow up in a system where gifted math kids could take classes at the local university, and from what I've heard this is common in various CA school districts as well. Hopefully, that won't be discouraged as I found it to be a huge positive being both much more interesting and good prep for university. It seems like the resources are widely available (in semi-rural/urban areas, and now online) to support kids with different learning speeds, styles, and interests. Holding back individuals, purely for the sake of raising the average, if that is their intention, is sick- learning isn't a zero-sum game, but should be the opposite.

[jelliclesfarm]

i agree with your new title, but also agree with the commentator below. Soviet Russia excelled in STEM which makes California public school education a tragic joke.

Russian School of Mathematics is very popular in Bay Area.I think there are branches all over the states(not sure). They exist solely for 'math enrichment of K-12 students'. The after school programs are tough and come highly recommended.

There is also 'Singapore Math' that I am not very familiar with but its supposed to be based on the very challenging Singapore Math curriculum.

[lostmsu]

What does this have to do with Soviet Union? Soviet Union always had gifted student programs.

[pushingice]

Lysenkoism, usually, when people refer to denial of reality in connection with the Soviet Union.

[inglor_cz]

Also, there was a weird period when cybernetics was considered bourgeoise pseudo-science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience

Late Stalinism is worth studying, if only to learn how twisted can an entire country become out of fear.

[garbagecoder]

Yeah imagine a country getting freaked out over a few dozens of millions of dead and going crazy and passing a bunch of insane laws and having its politics go insane. It’s not like that doesn’t describe post 9/11 America.

[Viliam1234]

The timing was a bit different though: first the country got crazy, then it passed a bunch of insane laws, then a few dozens of millions died, then they started WW2 (Molotov–Ribbentrop pact), and then a few more millions died.

[lostmsu]

I don't think denial of reality is something that would be strongly associated with SU, and not because it was not prevalent there, but because of its prevalence everywhere else.

[pandaman]

No, Soviet Union only got these programs in 1960s, when it started to suffer fully from its sciences being based on the "scientific Marxism-Leninism" and unable to catch up with advances in the West.

[SamReidHughes]

In short, they’re Commies.