The Smartest Kids in the World - Amanda Ripley
Go to Finland if you want to live the American dream. The reader of Amanda Ripley's book "The Smartest Kids in the World" may assume that the book fits into a very specific and well-liked genre as a result of these direct remarks from a British politician that she quotes. We enjoy reading about how different cultures maintain their weight, engage in sexual activity, and rear children. In this instance, Ripley is claiming to be able to demonstrate how other countries are able to educate pupils so much more successfully than we are, and her opening paragraphs offer a tempting hint of masochistic fulfillment. "American educators described Finland as a silken paradise," she says, "a country where all the teachers were admired and all the kids were loved.
How do other countries create “smarter” kids? What is it like to be a child in the world’s new education superpowers? The Smartest Kids in the World “gets well beneath the glossy surfaces of these foreign cultures and manages to make our own culture look newly strange....The question is whether the startling perspective provided by this masterly book can also generate the will to make changes” (The New York Times Book Review).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. Inspired to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embedded in these countries for one year. Kim, fifteen, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, eighteen, trades his 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.
