The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EI6A6NS | Format: PDF
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way Description
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, 15, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, 18, exchanges a high-achieving Minnesota suburb for a booming city in South Korea; and Tom, 17, 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.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 7 hours and 43 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: August 13, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EI6A6NS
By her own admission, journalist Amanda Ripley used to go out of her way to avoid writing articles about education. She'd rather cover almost anything else. But after she was assigned a story on a controversial educator, she became intrigued. What types of education helped children become smarter? Did particular skills help them tackle learning challenges better?
During her research, Ripley happened to see a chart compiling half a century of student test scores and performance rankings, gathered from a variety of different countries and cultures. She was intrigued - and puzzled. The data in that chart (collected by economists Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek) greatly changed her perspective and upended her assumptions about what children need to reach their learning potential.
The research revealed that in a handful of countries scattered across the world, kids seemed to be gaining critical learning skills, outpacing many other countries, including America (especially in math). From their earliest years, the students in these select areas learned effective and innovative ways to tackle reading, science, and math problems. Their skills also helped them master not only familiar but new information more quickly and easily.
What accounted for these differences over time? How on earth did Canada go from having a mediocre educational system to one with impressive results- even rivaling Japan? Why did a country without child poverty, Norway, end up with students who still received inadequate schooling? Why did American teenagers (even those attending elite schools) rank 18th in math compared to kids in New Zealand, Belgium, France, and other countries?
Amanda Ripley's book, "The Smartest Kids in the World" is a valuable addition to the literature on education policy. Its main contribution is to add a personal student view to what the education experience is like in Finland, Poland, and South Korea - three countries that score highly on standardized international tests - compared to the U.S., where scores are average in reading and mediocre in math. This personal student side of education is provided mainly by following three American high school students in their exchange school experiences in Finland, Poland, and South Korea.
The overall impression one is left with is that Finland and Poland's educational systems clearly have advantages over the U.S. system. These systems are more rigorous, and have higher expectations than the U.S. system. Furthermore, Finland apparently has much higher standards for teacher candidates, and higher relative teacher salaries. One is left to wonder if perhaps this teacher quality variable is the key to meaningful education reform.
On the other hand, although Ms. Ripley explicitly disagrees, it is hard to see why South Korea's education system would be preferred to the U.S. `s educational system. The South Korean system is largely motivated by an overly rigid "meritocracy" that bases college admission and hiring for good jobs on performance on a standardized test in high school. While this leads to a huge amount of time devoted to cramming for this test, one has to wonder how much learning is going on for anything that isn't tested. At one point, Ms. Ripley cites the literature that shows that much of life success depends on "soft skills", which involve many traits of character including social relationships, self-confidence, etc.
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