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    The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way
    The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way
    The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

    Written by Amanda Ripley

    Narrated by Kate Reading

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    How do other countries create "smarter" kids?

    In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they've never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy.

    What is it like to be a child in the world's new education superpowers?

    In a global quest to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embed-ded in these countries for one year. Kim, fifteen, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, eighteen, exchanges a high-achieving Minnesota suburb for a booming city in South Korea; and Tom, seventeen, leaves a historic Pennsylvania village for Poland.

    Through these young informants, Ripley meets battle-scarred reformers, sleep-deprived zombie students, and a teacher who earns $4 million a year. Their stories, along with groundbreaking research into learning in other cultures, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these countries had many "smart" kids a few decades ago. Things had changed. Teaching had become more rigorous; parents had focused on things that mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education.

    A journalistic tour de force, The Smartest Kids in the World is a book about building resilience in a new world-as told by the young Americans who have the most at stake.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 13, 2013
    ISBN9781452686110
    Author

    Amanda Ripley

    Amanda Ripley is the New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World, High Conflict, and The Unthinkable. She writes for The Atlantic, Politico, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

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    Reviews for The Smartest Kids in the World

    4.5/5

    49 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Very profound book! Great read! I think everyone in America should read this book!
    • 4/5
      Ripley travels to three countries - Poland, South Korea, and Finland - all of which have high school students testing higher than any other countries' students in the world. She also talked to three U.S. students who traveled to these three countries as part of exchange programs. Her findings, and their implications for how we could improve our own education system, are interesting and pretty important, I think. Definitely a recommended read to all who work in education or have children in U.S. schools.
    • 5/5
      My intention of reading this book was to know what we need to do as parents and how we can improve ourselves. The tips like 'emphasis on discipline and rigor', 'reading to younger children' and 'discussing matters with grown ups' are definitely reinforcing the kind of parenting that ought to provide to our kid.Discussion about being an authoritative vs authoritarian parenting was reviving for me as I have read it in The Nurture Assumption - Judith Harris. I'm now researching more on what it means to be an authoritative parent.The book provides a cross-cultural perspective about education and how it is handled in a few countries. I'd prefer to see the author make her research more extensive by including a few more countries like India, Australia and some of the Middle-eastern countries.Appendix I - how to spot a world-class education - was pretty interesting. The ways to identify great schools was an eye-opener.
    • 3/5
      I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.From GoodReads' The Smartest Kids in the World site:Through the compelling stories of three American teenagers living abroad and attending the world’s top-notch public high schools, an investigative reporter explains how these systems cultivate the “smartest” kids on the planet.America has long compared its students to top-performing kids of other nations. But how do the world’s education superpowers look through the eyes of an American high school student? Author Amanda Ripley follows three teenagers who chose to spend one school year living and learning in Finland, South Korea, and Poland. Through their adventures, Ripley discovers startling truths about how attitudes, parenting, and rigorous teaching have revolutionized these countries’ education results.In The Smartest Kids in the World, Ripley’s astonishing new insights reveal that top-performing countries have achieved greatness only in the past several decades; that the kids who live there are learning to think for themselves, partly through failing early and often; and that persistence, hard work, and resilience matter more to our children’s life chances than self-esteem or sports.Ripley’s investigative work seamlessly weaves narrative and research, providing in-depth analysis and gripping details that will keep you turning the pages. Written in a clear and engaging style, The Smartest Kids in the World will enliven public as well as dinner table debates over what makes for brighter and better students.My husband and I have been having lots of conversations about higher education in the United States, so when I read The Book Wheel's review of The Smartest Kids in the World, I decided to read the book to get a better understanding of what children are learning prior to entering college.I really enjoyed Ripley's writing style. I felt like I was going on a journey with the author. In my humble opinion, I think a conversational style is perfect for nonfiction books, because they are a journey of discovery for the author and are filled with the author's newly found opinions. Nonfiction books are typically filled with strongly supported hypotheses, so we might as well write them like that. As a science writer myself, I use the verbs to suggest, to indicate, to find a lot. I hate it when I am reading for pleasure and nonfiction writers describe strongly supported theories as fact. I thought this book had a lot of great take away messages for both parents and teachers. In particular, Ripley reports that parents are most helpful when they read to their children when they are young and ask their children how their days were when they are older. Interesting, but not too surprising, children whose parents are very involved in the schools' extracurricular activities tend to perform worse than children whose parents are not involved. Ripley notes that this is only a correlation, so parents might be encouraging their kids to focus more on extracurricular activities more than schoolwork or that parents are getting involved because their kids are doing poorly and want the school to look at their children in a better light. In regards to teachers, Ripley's research indicates that teachers that provide rigor and push their students to do better are doing more for their students than teachers who provide all the answers. As someone who had teachers who gave me the answers and other teachers who made me rewrite a thesis sentence ten million times before I could write the rest of the essay, I can attest that teachers who made me work for my grade had my respect and trust.Unlike some articles that I have read about school systems in other countries, Ripley does a good job showcasing what Finland, South Korea, and Poland do right and what these countries need to work on. It was refreshing to see that school systems around the world (not just the United States) have their problems. Of course, Ripley rightly shows that the United States' educational system has some serious problems and is ranked accordingly. She does give the United States hope; however, when she shows that countries like Poland have only made recent changes that have greatly improved their national rankings. We have hope as a country!Let's talk about some of my concerns with this book. My major concern was regarding the research in this book. Ripley focuses the book on one international exam, the PISA, and three international exchange students' perspectives. Although she does speak with some other people, Ripley appeared to get most of her book from these three high school students. Granted, I think that their opinions are well thought out and interesting; however, I wish that she had interviewed a broader group of people both within the United States and in other countries. When I first started the book, I thought Ripley had only three exchange students' perspectives, so I was a little worried. Then I discovered that she had done a survey including lots of students, so I felt better. Unfortunately, I then looked at the numbers. Ripley sent a survey out to 242 US students who attended school abroad and 1104 international students who attended school in the United States; however, only 37 American students and 165 international students responded. Ripley states that these data are still good; however, I cannot see how that is true without the needed statistical analyses that she does not provide. Throughout the book, she notes that 8 out of 10 students said "fill in the blank." I do not feel confident in these statements. The sample size is much to small. I may be wrong about this; however, the lack of any statistical explanation in the appendix does not lessen my concern. I think I would not have been so bothered by this, if she had cited more of her sources in the text. Because I did not know where statistics were coming from, I did not know if I could believe them. Ripley does have resources in the back of the book, but they are grouped by chapter, not line by line (at least this is how it was done in my galley copy). Some may argue that having lots of references in the text would be distracting, but Mary Roach does this in her books and they are very readable.So how did I like this book? This is a tough question. I loved the writing style, and I though the exchange student perspective was a great way of getting at a unique perspective. I thought that Ripley had some interesting theories on some of the problems with the American educational system and possible ways of improving it. At the same time, this book had several flaws. First, I thought a larger variety of people needed to be interviewed for this book. Second, if Ripely wanted to use her student survey, she needed to show more evidence that the results were not skewed. I think I am particularly alarmed by this survey, because she only explains its limitations in the appendix that I doubt many people read. I would recommend this book to someone who is interested in a jumping off point for learning more about the American educational system and how it differs from other countries' systems with the caveat that the statistical analyses may be misleading.Although I do have problems with the student survey statistics, I am still giving this book 3 out of 5 books for the international student exchange interviews and conversational style writing approach.
    • 4/5
      I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in education policy and reform.
    • 2/5
      I thought that this book started with promise, and then fizzled out. The topic that was chosen is a very important subject. Education is critical, and even in India, there are voices speaking out against the current system that does not encourage critical thinking.While she chose a good tool of following the stories of the young kids as they spent a year in several parts of the world, I do not think that she went into any real depth in exploring the topics. This is a tragedy, as this book has received good publicity, good reviews, and yet does not cover the subject at hand properly. This is a golden opportunity missed.
    • 2/5
      This hugely hyped book purports to summarise the reasons that Finland, South Korea and Poland have outstripped the US in terms of their education systems. It's a compellingly written book, using three exchange students as hooks and presenting a breezy and clear argument. But it feels simplistic. Even to a non-education expert like me - the arguments presented are too straightforward, the data too supportive and the implications too simple for any real world problem. Sure enough, some quick googling turns up equally compelling critiques of Ripley's arguments. I'm not saying that there aren't valid points in here, but the book felt like a triumph of rhetoric over substance to me.
    • 5/5
      This was fascinating, and not only because it mentioned International Baccalaureate programs. Ripley compares USian schools to those of other nations through the lens of foreign exchange students' experiences. I wanted to read it more or less as an adjunct to The Importance of Being Little to give a fuller picture of education from preschool to college, highlighting some of the places that do it exceptionally well.

      The US does well by some students, those with the greatest advantages to start with. There are tremendous inequities by income and race, and only the second is being addressed. Charter schools, many of which are for-profit, show no improvements over public schools on average, despite the tremendous gains they're supposed to enjoy by being freed from bureaucracy and particularly the horrors of tenured teachers who cannot be fired without cause. And why bother, when it isn't an issue that elected officials send their own children to private schools or to public schools in areas so wealthy they are defacto private schools?

      Korea also has a lot of crap schools, but it doesn't matter, because every parent who can afford it is hiring private tutoring companies to make up the difference, which isn't all that different from our own system.

      Finland and Poland however have some lessons to teach us. They are awesome, and they achieved awesome rather quickly. I won't give away all their secrets, but a rigorous education and commensurate pay for teachers isn't a bad idea.

      Highly recommended to people with a specific interest in education. I can't begin to imagine how it would appeal to readers who aren't keen on the topic.

      Library copy
    • 4/5
      I'm very glad I read this book. I've always been interested in education issues, probably since I went through much of my school career as part of the "guinea pig" year for a new curriculum. At first I felt negatively towards the author when she said in the introduction that she had always avoided covering education in her career as a journalist, because it didn't seem exciting enough. But I'm glad I persevered.In examining why US educational outcomes are so bad, Ripley looks at a few of the countries that are excelling in education: Finland, Korea, and Poland. And in order to get a deeper understanding than would be possible for a complete outsider, she focuses specifically on the experiences of three American exchange students, one in each of these countries. There's plenty of discussion about policy too, but the students' story definitely made the book more interesting.The Korean system, while effective in its way, isn't seen as ideal because of the extreme stress it imposes on everyone. So much in Korea is based on test scores, so there's an enormous after-school education market, and curfews were recently imposed to forbid attending one of these tutoring places after midnight. Students studied so much after school that they would fall asleep in their regular school classes, sometimes bringing along a pillow. The whole thing is pretty messed up, but the students do learn a lot.Finland is seen as a much better model, because students manage to learn a lot without overdoing it. The key here is largely in teacher quality and prestige: as part of significant education reforms, Finland moved teacher training programs into the top universities (comparable to MIT etc.), so that only the best students can become teachers. The teacher training is long and rigorous, with plenty of practice teaching, so that teachers come out thoroughly prepared to teach. They're paid a decent salary, and given a lot of respect and freedom. Basically, teaching is seen as a high-level job, and it attracts the best candidates, and the whole thing is a virtuous circle.One interesting point is that in order to enact these reforms, Finland did at some point impose the sort of painful accountability measures that are found in the US today. But while the United States has focused just on punishing teachers who do badly, it hasn't taken the extra steps of producing better-trained teachers who were themselves more academically successful and making the job appealing enough (in pay, prestige, etc.) that those teachers will stick around. In Finland, it actually turned out that all the accountability measures were no longer needed once the teacher selection and training process had been thoroughly revised, but they did play an important role initially.Ripley also points out that the idea of choosing better-qualified teachers wouldn't necessarily fly in the United States. There's an idea that anyone should be able to become a teacher—that they deserve the opportunity—and a fear of elitism if teacher training programs admitted only students in the top third of their class.Meanwhile, for Poland, the most striking and shocking idea was just how detrimental streaming is to the students placed into the lower stream. At one point, the Polish government decided to delay streaming by just one year, keeping the academic and vocational students together until they were 16. This meant building thousands of new schools to accommodate the extra students for that extra year, but the consequences were dramatic and average test scores for 15-year-olds shot up. Even more importantly, though, they plummeted the following year for students who were placed in the vocational stream, showing that a lot of the difference was just about expectations. Students in vocational streams just weren't expected to do very well academically, and so they didn't.This was a particularly significant point to me because I've always been very much in favour of streaming—I was in gifted classes starting in Grade 3, and I definitely noticed the difference in unstreamed high school courses like Civics, where the learning was done at a much lower level. It's tricky to offer extra opportunities to students who are doing well without offering fewer opportunities to the others, but I wonder whether there could be a regular stream and an advanced stream but no below-average stream. I also find it confusing in general that "vocational" often ends up being just less—I feel like there should be plenty of hands-on type stuff that certain types of people excel at, and that I couldn't do at all, but that's just *different*, not a watered-down version of the academic curriculum. Anyway, much to ponder there.This whole book was very thought-provoking, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in education. I may also look for Ripley's other book, The Unthinkable, on a completely different topic.
    • 5/5
      This is the best book I have read on education in a long time. It changed my thinking on the topic, and I hope it will change lots of other peoples' thinking about it. To that end, I have already sent it to two sets of parents of young children (these parents are the ones who can benefit most from this book) and plan to send it to more.What's so special about it? The book isn't long, it isn't weightily academic, and it relies in part on anecdotes about four specific kids, hardly a statistically significant sample. The first thing that's special is that it starts with a question -- why, when we spend more per pupil than almost any other country, are our outcomes disappointing -- rather than with an answer. The second is that it bases its answers on how students perform in a wide range of countries, not just in the U.S. Finally, the statistics are amplified by the stories of four kids -- three U.S. exchange students abroad, and one Korean kid here. This added a lot to the book, for me at least. As it turns out, students perform very differently in different countries, and performance within countries can change dramatically over time. And those differences are not determined by the factors I for one would expect. Yes, richer countries tend to do somewhat better than poorer countries, but some rich countries have mediocre results (Norway) while some poorer countries (Poland) have shown dramatic improvement. Yes, big income differentials and ethnic differences do tend to pull down performance, but some countries with big income differentials (Singapore) perform very well. Higher spending per pupil does not seem to correlate well with educational outcomes, nor does technology seem to add much.What does matter is teachers -- where teaching is a highly selective, respected, and well paid profession, children do better. What also matters is expectations -- children who are expected to work hard and do well tend to outperform children who can easily get a do-over. And parental involvement is very important, but not the parental involvement that comes from proctoring the class trip, or coaching the volleyball team. Children whose parents read to the children, and who read for their own enjoyment, tend to outperform children whose parents aren't into books. Ms. Ripley has other specific advice for parents, including a checklist on what to look for if you are evaluating a school.This is a particularly important book for parents, but it also matters for concerned citizens, taxpayers, and businesspeople. And, let's hope, politicians.
    • 4/5
      The educational systems of Korea, Poland, and Finland, compared to those in the US, both in general and through the experiences of three American exchange students (and one student who moves back and forth from Korea to the US with her family). Ripley argues that high expectations and rigor are the key to success, but that the US has imposed the expectations at exactly the wrong point (tests that punish teachers but have little relevance to the students themselves). Instead, successful countries—primarily Finland is the example here—make teaching a highly rigorous and respected profession by requiring a lot of training for teachers, both academic and hands-on, and only selecting teachers from the top third of their own classes. Finland has produced great results even in schools with large percentages of immigrants who don’t speak Finnish at home, which means that homogeneity isn’t the simple explanation for why we can’t get the same job done. American parents value sports and easy academics over the hard work of learning, especially in math; they’d prefer good grades to good outcomes. The prescriptions are simple but not easy: read to kids and talk to them about current events; have a few tests that actually matter to kids rather than a lot of tests that don’t; train teachers well and have them continue professional development throughout their careers, but also pay them well and give them autonomy; deemphasize sports as part of the school experience; teach kids to work through initial failure—success regularly comes from repeated hard work, not from innate talent.
    • 4/5
      A deep dive into education in America vs. the rest of the world. The author highlights the relaxed, but successful style of teaching in Finland and the intense and exhausting style in South Korea. She interviewed American foreign exchange students in both countries and compared their experiences. She highlighted the emphasis on sports over education in the US compared with other places. Interesting and also concerning.
    • 4/5
      Is this the best book I’ve read this year about education? Yes, it is. And I’ve read a lot of books this year about education. This one was best of all. It looked at education the way I like to look at things: it looked at education that works. Ripley studied the strong educational systems in three countries, Korea and Finland and Poland, and analyzed why each is so successful.Lots of lessons here for those of us here in the US who want our children to get an excellent education.