“Success,” as Winston Churchill once said, “is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Despite the way many education systems are set up all around the world, there are drastic differences in results and attitudes towards academics. In Amanda Ripley’s book The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda takes on the journalistic challenge of showing different perspectives of education by following three American students to Finland, South Korea, and Poland. Rather than only criticizing the way the United States has failed the younger generation, Ripley offers a fair viewpoint, the ups and downs of each visited country to highlight insights of each system in place.

The strongest point of this book is how deep Ripley digs into the core issues of the countries. She doesn’t stop at poor scores or blame economic status as a reason of America’s poor standardize testing. The normal excuses aren’t enough, as Ripley takes on each topic with impeccable detail. I appreciate the historical context and each political move that took place to show the bigger picture of how each country was able to progress in a relatively short time. I’ve gained a newfound respect for educators that work hard to build the future generations of the world.

Without getting too deep into the main draw of the book, some of the main takeaways from the book were surprising to me:

1. Schools should aim to allocate resources to hiring and growing good teachers rather than technology. Being selective about teachers builds trust for teachers to build their own cirriculum and choose their own material.
2. Don’t put labels onto students (such as gifted, vocational) if possible, and do so later if needed. The gifted child syndrome is a real thing.
3. Expect a great deal from students, regardless of the differences that they bring into the classroom.

I recognize that each student is different, and grows in different ways. It feels pointless even to use a standardized test to measure intelligence, especially when it comes in so many different forms. My only complaint with this book was that Ripley overemphasizes test scores (PISA scores) as the main pillar of her arguments. How can this test be the only main unit of intelligence in the book? How come the SAT or other tests were only briefly talked about despite her acknowledgement of there being no perfect test? This overreliance of the PISA test with the small sample size retracted a lot of her ideas.

Overall, this book was certainly interesting for me, despite my lack of interest in the field of general education. As someone who has finished the education system and is considered a “successful output”, I see how fortunate I was to have the opportunity that I had and the learning environment that I did.

Overall Rating: 6/10