In This Issue

Amanda Ripley gives us a detailed, separate report on the  experiences of each American child she followed who had studied abroad, including each one’s take on what made school in those countries so successful. The youngster’s comparisons are forthright and fascinating. So are Ms. Ripley’s conclusions and descriptions in The Smartest Kids in the World. Annie Choi’s wit is pointed but not savage. She uses humor in Shut Up You’re Welcome to underscore the essential, sustained importance of family, the collective umbilical cord that binds.

The Smartest Kids in the World
by Amanda Ripley, © 2013
Published by Simon & Schuster
Hardcover: 198 pp plus another 90 pp of Notes, Bibliography, Appendices and an Author’s note

Reviewed by Julia Sneden

As indicated above, this book has been thoroughly researched and annotated in impressive, if lengthy, fashion. Do not let the many pages of documentation put you off: the book is anything but dull or pedantic.

Photograph of author Amanda Ripley by Brooke Bready

Ms. Ripley, a journalist, may be familiar to Sr. Women Web's readers through her articles in both Time magazine and The Atlantic Monthly. However, as she tells us in her Prologue, "For most of my career ... I worked hard to avoid education stories ... I didn’t say so out loud, but education stories seemed, well, kind of soft."

However, when asked to write a story about a controversial educator, Ripley delved into research concerning the general subject of education. She discovered that far beyond the story about the individual educator, there was a more intricate problem in the field. As she succinctly puts it: "Why were some kids learning so much — and others so very little?" Despite the fact that a lot was known about the problems of disparity, there was no consistent approach as to how to solve it.

Further research indicated that despite programs sponsored by government, ("No Child Left Behind" or "Race to the Top," for example) our test scores and evaluations have remained depressingly the same, or close to it. "Our elementary students did fine on international tests… especially in reading. The problems arose in math and science…"By their teenage years, American kids scored twenty-sixth on a test of critical thinking in math, below average for the developed world."

And then Ms. Ripley saw a chart, one that indicated that the right kind of concerted effort could make a huge difference in a country’s efforts to improve education. While the United States and others had test scores that varied little over a 50-year period, the scores for Finland had risen from mid-point to the very top. Korea, which had been the top, was still right up there, just a shade below Finland. And Canada, which had first been charted a bit below the US, had managed, in a 30-year drive, to emerge in fourth place, just a shade below Japan.

In the process of trying to discover which steps work when a country tries to improve its educational test scores, Ms. Ripley hit on a fortuitous idea: she would track students, American students, who were going to study abroad. She picked three high school youngsters: one was about to attend school in Finland; one went to Korea; and one went to Poland.

Following a short biography of each youngster, Ripley gives us a detailed, separate report on the  experiences of each, including each one’s "take" on what made school in those countries so successful. The youngster’s comparisons are forthright and fascinating. So are Ms. Ripley’s conclusions and descriptions.

In amidst the myriad small details, charts, and interviews, Ripley often refers to the PISA, a test first introduced in 2000. It is a test designed to "measure the kind of advanced thinking and communication skills" that people need in order to thrive in the modern world. It does not test what kids have memorized, or learned from classroom drill. "Those [other] tests," she says, "usually quantified students' preparedness for more schooling, not their preparedness for life. None measured teenagers' ability to think critically and solve new problems in math, reading, and science. The promise of PISA was that it would reveal which countries were teaching kids to think for themselves."

Pages: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4

More Articles

• Veterans Health Care: Efforts to Hire Licensed Professional Mental Health Counselors and Marriage and Family Therapists
• Joan L.Cannon Wrote: A Family Inheritance: More Than 'Things' ... Emblems of Our Lives
• Rose Madeline Mula Writes: How Come ... ?
• Rose Madeline Mula Writes: I Feel Like That Carton of Milk In the Refrigerator Which Is Beyond Its Expiration Date
• The Scout Report: Penn and Slavery Project, Robots Reading Vogue, Open Book Publishers, Black History in Two Minutes & Maps of Home
• The Morgan's Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol: Christmas is nothing more than “a time for finding yourself a year older and not an hour richer”said Scrooge
• Julia Sneden Wrote Napkin Rings and Saving Ways: Initials Engraved in Silver, Rings That Were Clearly Ours, Each One Different From Anyone Else's
• Rose Madeline Mula Writes: Look Who's Talking
• Ferida Wolff's Backyard: Hostas and Us; Waving Beans
• “Housewife” to “Hussy”; A Revisit To Grammarphobia: From Domestic to Disreputable