As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience.

The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here.

I’d also like to add the high school curriculum is very dense. The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.

There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests, and I’ve only encountered students from good schools in them (as far as I can remember).

Yes, Romania is much better at filtering and at training people who are predisposed to intelectual work from a young age. Yes, Romania is bad at educating the masses.

However, I disagree with his conclusion and value judgement. I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.

I have mixed feelings. "Educating the masses" is important, at least to a certain baseline, otherwise we get failing democracies due to manipulation of uneducated voters.

But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.

The practical issue which so many people don't seem to want to acknowledge is that students are different. I have taught and there are some students that simply lack either the intelligence, discipline, interest, or some other aspect that makes it literally impossible for them to ever receive anything beyond a basic education. You could give them 10 on 1 specialized instruction from the the most competent/interesting/engaging teachers and tutors imaginable, and they're still just not going to excel.

And then on the other end of the spectrum there are kids who will proactively read, on their own, through e.g. their math textbook, understand everything with no difficulty, and basically get nothing academic out of their education (beyond that which they'd get from simply having the books) unless one engages in extreme 'differentiation' which is an educational buzzword that is basically just glorified in-class 'filtering' that imposes a massive workload on teachers, creates inequity within the classroom itself, and is really just quite dysfunctional.

And so the typical results of trying to give an advanced education to everyone is that you end up pulling the top down, rather than lifting the bottom up. This is even more true because the bottom is also often disproportionately filled with students who have extreme behavioral problems often alongside families who just don't particularly care about their education, while the top is rarely disruptive except for the smart-ass type who's generally just trying to get some giggles rather than being actively hostile.

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I think seeing things as a teacher makes you view things radically different than you do as a student. You're probably one of those overachiever types given your comment, and perhaps you feel that you worked a bit harder, maybe were a bit interested in the material then your peers or whatever. But I can assure you - that's generally not it. There are kids that try hard, even some that get things like multiple in-home tutors, and they still just can't excel no matter how hard their parents, or they, try.

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Edit: Just found this [1] interesting Wiki page. You can see the list of countries, by gold medals in the last 10 Olympiads. In order of medals: USA, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, Vietnam, UK, Iran, Canada, Singapore, China.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou...

Here's one issue. Romania has a really lousy motorway system, what there is of it. I gather that corruption has much to do with this apart from construction difficulties involving the Carpathians. As an example there isn't even a motorway between Bucharest and Brasov (88 miles or 141 km apart), the latter being a favorite destination for tourists and wealthy and not-so wealthy second home owners alike. The trip by car either way is usually a nightmare. I should add that Brasov is one of the major towns of Romania not just a tourist attraction.

To the point! The plight of innumerable isolated rural communities trying to attract decent teachers and conditions for their kids is clear to see. Trains don't cut it. General poverty results with knock-on effects.

> I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.

Be careful what you wish for.

I understand the sentiment, and I wish we could make education as good as possible for everyone. The problem is, "as good as possible" is still very different for different people. So if you change the system so that everyone learns the same and no concentration of cognitive elites is allowed, it will mean that you have to really slow down the curriculum, to allow the average (and below-average) students to catch up with it. So the smartest kids won't get the best education they can get, and probably not even the kind of education they can get today.

> The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.

I suspect that this is how it probably happened. You were better at math then average, so you were allowed to learn faster than the average. The kid in Denmark who was your equivalent probably had to learn math at the same speed as the average Danish student. That's why they had to wait to learn that kind of math at university.

> There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests

Yes, but it's still a huge waste of time if at school you have the math you already know, and you can only get the better math in the after-school activity; when you could be learning it at school instead.

The problem with this line of thinking is that nobody is "predisposed" to intellectual work" It's entirely a system designed to recreate elites and study to tests. There is no scientific basis for the claim that teaching young students specialized mathematics is beneficial to their education