Education for IT professionals in Russia and in America. Part one

Due to certain circumstances, I had to change several educational institutions in my life: having visited both a Russian school and a Russian university in the specialty “Physics”, and even having studied a year in an American school, now I am studying the specialty “Computer Science” in an American university .

Having a similar experience, I think that I can and have the right to make various comparisons and just express thoughts about what I would like to do in this article. Considering that no one likes reading a lot of text, I have divided this article into two parts: the first part, which you are reading now, describes the high school in America and Russia and makes a comparison of the advantages for a programmer and those who sympathize with computer scientists; the second part directly describes higher education.

So let's get started! I will begin, perhaps, with my vision of the situation in a normal, Russian school. In the Russian school tradition, the separation of teachers by students into bad students, bad guys, bad students, horoshists and honors students is incredibly strong. The labeling system works so well (why this is a separate conversation), that sometimes one wonders how the teachers so accurately manage to “understand” which of the students who is. Unfortunately, the label usually becomes attached at the very beginning of the school career and then it is rather difficult to get rid of it, especially under the asphalt-roller roller of the methods of secondary school teachers. All students know what grades their friends have and this often leads to a mismatch of formal “status” in the school community. So it turns out that a sufficiently large number of future IT people have, so to speak, hostility to the system (so, in any case, it was about four years ago when I finished school) and this hostility makes them outsiders in the school hierarchy. Only when computer science lessons begin, they manifest themselves and are almost always “excellent”, of course, if they do not enter into counter-exercises with the teacher. Tellingly, the school usually does not provide almost any knowledge of the subject, except for powerful skills in working with the Word and with a simple BASIC or Pascal compiler. Maybe these languages ​​were once adequate for learning, but now there are obviously better options such as Python and Java.
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I think no one will argue with me that a real IT specialist is an engineer who needs to have a special mindset, which is formed by logic and exact sciences, such as mathematics and physics. We have to admit that there has never been a problem with physics in Russia: if you study correctly, then it is quite possible to prepare for university exams at school, which cannot be said about mathematics. Not only is the school course absolutely unprepared for the university level, so you usually have to work on the side to enroll in an adequate university (I, for example, worked in the correspondence school at MIPT), until the end of the course the concept of limits and integrals is demonstrated , at the same time, without revealing at all and without explaining what dx is or that the limit of the sum is the integral. Of course, one can say that it is necessary for someone to figure it out for themselves, but I consider such an approach senseless: why demonstrate something that is not explained anyway?

In Russia, during all ten school years, the class does not change, that is, there are established quite close, friendly relations within individual groups. Often found several people who are interested in programming and computers. These few people, supporting each other, are able to help, explore and learn something new much more effectively than if one person did it. In this, I think there is an indisputable plus of the Russian system in front of the American.

This is how we smoothly passed to the western hemisphere of our Earth, the most interesting part of the article. In America, the school is arranged a little differently. Each student is considered separately here, there are no such classes at all. The student is free to choose items that he considers necessary for himself, for his interests and, ultimately, for his career. Every year there is a certain number of so-called credits that a student must take, say, four credits in mathematics, four in the natural sciences, three in the English language, two in physical education, and three in the humanities. In different places and in different years, the number of credits may vary, but the concept is clearly visible: it is impossible to do one physical exercise for eight years or one literature for the last four years. But even so, at the end of the school there is a fairly good chance to have knowledge of mathematics at the level of the Russian eighth-grader, and first-year literature at the university.
This is perhaps the most interesting thing - here there is an opportunity in school for some subjects to study in the first-year program of the university. When I had the chance to experience the school education system here, I skillfully registered for university courses in matan, Newtonian mechanics and programming. The official name for this is Advanced Placement. It is understood that the smartest guys will take up these courses in order to get loans at the university and have a powerful knowledge base for much more complex university courses.

Having studied the first semester in a Russian technical university, I can say that in an American school the matana course is truly university and even surpasses it in some way. Physics does not use integrals, which, in essence, does not make it completely “university”; I would say that it looks more like ordinary school physics in Russia. However, at the university, it is explained by integrals. Well, finally programming. At school, Java was used to study programming. It was said that C ++ was used before, but I consider this to be complete insanity. On Java, procedural programming was skillfully shown, smoothly transformed into object-oriented programming. Every couple of weeks, the students performed some small project that allowed them to more fully cover the concepts and cut the piece altogether. At the end of the course there was a relatively large project that was carried out in pairs. My partner and I programmed a maze game that used Swing for the graphic part and our boring logical calculations for the software. Even in spite of the fact that I already knew everything that was going on this, it was interesting to me, because the teacher for strong students gave more complex tasks for logic and understanding.

I think it’s time to finish, the article is already quite large. To summarize, you can see that the American school provides more opportunities for strong, goal-oriented students, but is unable to do anything for those who are not interested in anything. That is why there is a myth that "all American schoolchildren (and in special cases all Americans) are stupid." In the Russian school, the majority of people are given more knowledge, but they don’t provide an opportunity to study something outside the program, so you have to look for sources on the side.

Thanks to everyone who read this. If there is interest from the users, I will publish the second part of the article about universities.

Published the second part . Read.