Arielle Basel

IDC 201-201
Ripley Book Reflection

The Smartest Kids in the World: and How They Got That Way Reflection
The book The Smartest kids in the World and How They got That Way by Amanda
Ripley, follows three exchange students along their journeys from their hometowns in America
to Finland, South Korea, and Poland. Ripley compares each system to each other, each student,
and everything, in turn, back to the United States. She takes the time to show a wide variety in
schooling across the globe. We Americans may think we have it hard here in terms of education,
but not nearly as hard as they do in South Korea. South Korea is incredibly stricter than Poland,
where failure is accepted. Finland is on top of the world in terms of education in accordance to
the PISA scores and their teachers are held with as much prestige as a doctor in America. This all
comes back in full circle to the question at hand: what the heck is wrong with America, and why
are we no longer on top? In my opinion, Ripley is making a bold statement with the cover of her
book. Amanda Ripley, the author, designed a title with not a single capital letter, including her
name. This, obviously, does not follow any rules of grammar; to me that is a statement being
made. An American author who is writing a book about the smartest kids in the world, choose
not to make any of the letters of her title or name capitalized, as a smart kid would know to do.
Our journey across Europe and Asia starts in Sallisaw, Oklahoma with Kim. Kim, to me
seemed very out of place in Sallisaw until she began to be recognized for her SAT results from
7
th
grade. After that, she was invited to attend Duke University for an intensive summer program,
and her ambition for the bigger and better steadily grew. A visit to her sister in Texas had her
thinking down the track of going abroad. Meanwhile, her very own Principal did not have much
to say about how well his alumni, that he was responsible for graduating with a diploma stating
they were college ready, were actually doing in college I asked Principal Martens about all
the Sallisaw alumni who were retaking math or English. That really doesnt bother me, he said,
because at least they are trying.Whether his graduates succeeded there [in college] was out
of his control, or so it seemed. I completely agree with Ripley here when she states The fact
that those kids have spent four years in his school preparing to get to college-and that hed given
them a diploma that was supposed to mean they were ready-did not seem relevant. To me, she
seems to state this with disgust, as if he does not realize that he is responsible for their near
Arielle Basel
IDC 201-201
Ripley Book Reflection

failure of college. Thankfully, this did not hold back Kim from fundraising all of her money to
go on her exchange trip to Finland where she learned a true respect for education.
Finland brought amazement for Kim. In Finnish schools, students, no matter what walk
of life they came from cared about their education and wanted to learn; that is just what they did.
She began to notice, there just seemed to be something in the air here. Whatever it was, it
made everyone more serious about learning.... Kim found herself asking another student, Why
do you care so much? and to that they replied Its school,[]how else will I graduate and go
to university and get a good job? Such a simple answer had her questioning her hometown
school and concluded, In their experience, education wasnt all that serious. Teachers in
Finland were respected and taken as serious as a doctor would be taken here in America. In
Finland, all education schools were selective. Getting into a teacher-training program there was
as prestigious as getting into a medical school in the United States. To me, Finland has laid out
all the right standards. They hold teachers to an utmost level, and students actually want to go to
school. This is unlike South Korea where students push themselves to the breaking point.
In South Korea, Eric learned, students would go to school from essentially eight in the
morning until eleven oclock at night time. They would attend class until 4:10pm then, After
classes, the kids cleaned the schoolAt four thirty, everyone settled back in to their seats for
test-prep classesAfter dinner came yaja, a two hour period of study Around nine in the
evening, [they] finally left. This is when they went to their own private tutors, hagwons, and
then returned home by eleven. All of this in preparation for the future-defining test they took at
the end of high school. Here they took schooling to the extreme. The kids would push themselves
almost to the breaking point just to get the scores to prove to their parents they were worth
something. Here they were on top of the world in math and that was simply because they did not
give up. I know for a fact that I gave up on math a long, long time ago and Im only 19. Eric
began to realize Teenagers were in all kinds of closets, sometimes literally, locked into small,
airless spaces, studying for the test. This test was an all-consuming test and the Koreans had
begun to structure their lives around it to stay on top. Eric, was learning that the top of the
world could be a lonely place, and the important question was not just which kids lived there, but
what they had gone through to get there. That statement describes to me just how deep an
Arielle Basel
IDC 201-201
Ripley Book Reflection

impact their education has on them in their culture and that scares me. To fail at something there
is to fail at your lifes goal. There was a boy that killed his mom over test scores he did not want
her to see, and got off easy because the jury pitied him. That completely contrasts with life in
Poland.
Tom was followed to Poland from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. To start, Poland is graded
on a scale from 1-5, Tom noticed that no one ever got a 5 and they accepted that; failure was not
uncommon, much unlike the U.S. school systems. If they had been in South Korea, that would
have been a different story. He noticed, Kids in Poland were used to failing, it seemed. The
logic made sense. If the work was hard, routine failure was the only way to learn. Success, as
Winston Churchill once said, is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
This makes me feel as though there is some hope for other countries, in terms that they arent
giving up like many of us Americans would but they are not killing themselves for a grade like
South Koreans would. Here, I see Poland as a happy medium. Their take on math was
astonishing to me too, they had the same logic to not give up, if you believed math was really,
truly important-and all kids were capable of learning it. Tom and Kim took the easy way out to
me, they both gave up on math as I did. If we all had just kept pushing like the Koreans we
would believe in ourselves enough that we could do it.
In the end I believe three things. Discipline such as the South Koreans will get you
knowledge, but you will have lived your life without living it. Teachers like the Finish will help
you have a better respect for the knowledge that you are given. Polands belief about failure will
have you succeed in life if you never give up. I feel as though in Finland, Kim ended up
blooming and finding her true self. In South Korea, Eric settled down over his year there, after he
bonded with Jenny over the weirdness of the stress there, in accordance to the test. Tom, I feel
grew from his experience in Poland while he went on to colleg. Heikki Vuorinen from Finland
could not have said it better with the following, Wealth doesnt mean a thing, he said. Its
your brain that counts. If we try to blame failure on poverty, or wealth, we will end up no
smarter than the monkeys.

Arielle Basel
IDC 201-201
Ripley Book Reflection

References
Ripley, A. (2013). The smartest kids in the world: And how they got that way.
New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.