Sometimes things just work...

I'll leave the juvenile innuendos about your post-date activities for another time, and focus on my congratulations for meeting this remarkable woman... ("lips hurt" my lilly-white ass!).

The woman grew up in Moscow, and if she is 32, then she is still old enough to remember some aspects of true "communist" Russia (even if most of it was under the "reformer" himself, Misha Gorbachev). I've been there (and done that), and while my past experience was with a "Leningradnik" and not a Moscovite... I'm sure the basics were the same.

Elyena Mishayakovna was a stunningly beautiful, and "scary smart" young woman who spoke Russian, German and English with confidence and flair, and who could (when the mood struck her) be shockingly pointed in her political views. She was utterly disdainful of the communist system even back in 1988 (when knew her), but was not a modern, American "conservative" by any stretch of the imagination, either. She was just as prone to point out perceived failings in the American historical example as she was to point out Soviet failings. The stories I could tell you of the talks we had... wow.

My point is that, while I am confident that Elyena is a bit older than Ryan's 32-year-old former Soviet from Moscva (about 8 years older, in fact)... they both stem from the same national education system, which was as centrally organized as any in world history. Both came out with a stunningly impressive education (obviously) and the evidence provided by both that the Soviet education system managed to reduce the illiteracy rate of the nation to nearly zero pales in comparison to the evidence that the literacy rate in multiple languages was so staggeringly HIGH.

I've long understood that you couldn't graduate high school (or, rather, its equivalent) in the former USSR without four years of a foreign language, and these skills with a foreign language constituted a full 50% of the requirements to enter into any kind of post-secondary educational program, and were flat out REQUIRED for consideration into the Red Army's officer corps. Both these women seem to be excellent examples of how fantastically this has worked for the Russian people as a whole (even if it didn't prove beneficial enough for the former USSR).

So, I ask again a question that we have debated many times within the Bund (either on Ryan's driveway or here): What worked in the old Soviet education system, and by extension the existing Russian one today, that does not work here in the US... where a staggering percentage of graduating high school students don't even show a proficiency with their native tongue... ENGLISH? Why is the illiteracy rate so low there, while the number of bilingual or even trilingual students so disproportionately high when compared to the US? Why is the stereotype of an immigrant citizen here in the US who can't speak English NEVER of an Eastern European, but almost always of an Asian or Latin American? Why do we not see the same disparity in language skills when we look at immigrant Eastern Europeans, or trans-Caucus, or even Middle Eastern peoples? NONE of these peoples have a traditional, ethnic connection to English that even most Western European nations share... yet all have a strong, basic understanding of the language very quickly upon arriving in the US, even if they didn't have it prior to coming?

Nothing in their genetic or racial background has anything to do with it... but their education and fundamental development in their parent societies DOES. I'm asking, honestly and candidly...

What is that factor?