Fareed speaks with journalist Amanda Ripley, author of 'The Smartest Kids in the World and How They ...

1. Education – Global Public Square
Fareed speaks with journalist Amanda Ripley, author of 'The Smartest Kids in the World and How
They Got That Way,' about what other countries can teach the U.S. about education. Watch the video
for the full interview.
America is exceptional in many ways. Sadly,
secondary education is not one of them. The most
recent rankings for the Program for International
Student Assessment has American 15 year-olds
ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in
math, among other developed nations. Countries
like Finland and South Korea always rank near the
top.
In a 2011 GPS special, we went to those two
countries to see what they were doing differently. Investigative journalist Amanda Ripley went one
step further. She followed some American kids as they spent a year abroad in high search engines
school in those two countries and in Poland. The results are fascinating. The book is called The
Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way.
Amanda Ripley joins me now. So what did you find about those three countries that struck you? You
actually have three models that you say that they represent. What are they?
So, South Korea is the pressure cooker model. The extreme case of what you see all over Asia, where
kids are working night and day, literally, under a lot of family pressure, to get very high test scores.
Now, South Korea does get those high test scores, but at great cost. So that's one, the pressure
cooker model.
Finland is, in http://www.schlowlibrary.org/children many ways, the opposite extreme of South
Korea. Not in all ways, but in some. And Finland is what I call the utopia model - they've really
invested in quality over quantity and the kids are, on average, doing less homework than our kids,
but still achieving at the very top of the world on tests of critical thinking and math, reading and
science, with very little variation from school to school or from socioeconomic status from one to the
other.
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