The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda Ripley

The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda Ripley.  ISBN: 9781451654424

Read August 20

 

Nonfiction: education comparisons through time and between four main countries: USA, Poland, Finland, and South Korea. 

 

I really enjoyed Ripley's first book: The Unthinkable.  In fact, I've probably bought more copies of that book as a gift for friends and family than I really want to think about.  This one - not so amazing, but still good.  I do like that she's got a fairly tight focus on the countries involved, and that she uses real experiences of study-abroad kids and her interviews with them to provide a human-interest angle.  That part certainly worked.  But I really feel like this is unfinished.  I don't know what I was expecting - some sort of manifesto or clear lessons to be taken from each different place (both positive and negative) but I was expecting something -  and there wasn't anything.  No real conclusion or stirring call to action.  It was an interesting and finely-crafted journey through the education policies and practices across the world, but it was sort of like an amusement park ride - all that rising and falling and interest and anticipation, and you end up exactly back where you started.  Sadly, the only real spark this has given me is to my resolve: to homeschool any of my hypothetical eventual children.

 

As always, I am in awe of the volume of footnotes and references in Ripley's works.  I wish every nonfiction book had half as many notes and resources cited to follow back to their sources.