Analysis Of The Smartest Kids In The World Essay

In The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley investigates the education systems of three of the world’s highest performing countries offering insight into the components necessary to raise education in the United States from its current mediocre place on the world stage. By involving three teenage American exchange students, Ripley gained access to firsthand experience of the familiar US system as compared to the highly competitive systems in Finland, South Korea and Poland. The author proposes that, although the systems vary greatly, commonalities in cultural valuation of education, rigor and teacher quality have made students from these three countries the “smartest kids in the world.”

Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist for Time, The Atlantic and other magazines has masterfully explored topics such as human behavior under extreme stress, how we can handle stress better, the primacy of sports in American high schools, the colleges of the future, the workings of the brain human, expectations placed upon children in school settings and how human behavior compares with public policy. Her writing style is both engaging and informative, winning her multiple awards and television appearances. In addressing the gap between the American education system and that of

3). The graph compared international test scores of students from fifteen different countries over a period of fifty years. The graph showed that “worldwide, children’s skills rose and fell in mysterious and hopeful ways, sometimes over short periods of time” (p. 3). The discrepancies between student performance led Ripley to investigate why, in just a handful of eclectic nations virtually all students were learning critical thinking skills in math, reading and science as well as obtaining training to survive in the modern