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THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD

Name: THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD
Author: Amanda Ripley
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5442-4

AND HOW THEY GOT THAT WAY

by Amanda Ripley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2013

A compelling, instructive account regarding education in America, where the arguments have become “so nasty, provincial, and...

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Chronicle of a journalist’s global travels to visit schools, interviewing educators and talking with students and their families in order to answer the question, “Why were some kids learning so much—and others so very little?”

Ripley (The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, 2008) examines why there is a disparity in performance on tests of mathematical and scientific competence between American students and their global counterparts, even when factors such as poverty and discrimination are taken into account. She explains that America's poor showing translates into lost jobs for Americans, who cannot compete with foreign labor even in semiskilled jobs. Many of the arguments about American education fail to address the real issues behind the competitive failure of American schools compared to Finnish and South Korean schools (where students are in the top tier on international tests), as well as Poland, where the rate of improvement is remarkable. Ripley builds her narrative around the experience of three American teenagers, each of whom spent a year abroad as exchange students—in Finland, South Korea and Poland, respectively. The author describes a political consensus in each of the three countries that nearly guarantees the creation and maintenance of a highly educated workforce, from top to bottom. The importance of education is a reflection of national consensus on the respect for teachers. A large portion of their education budgets go to teachers’ salaries, and the instructors are chosen from the top third of their graduating classes and must meet high professional standards on a par with engineers. Per capita, America spends more money on education, but the money is allocated differently—e.g., to sports teams and programs that provide students with laptops, iPads and interactive whiteboards.

A compelling, instructive account regarding education in America, where the arguments have become “so nasty, provincial, and redundant that they no longer lead anywhere worth going."

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4516-5442-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 21, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013

Categories:

EDUCATION

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AN EMBARRASSMENT OF TYRANNIES

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF INDEX ON CENSORSHIP

edited by W.L. Webb & Rose Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 1998

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A powerfully hard-hitting collection of short essays. Contributor and longtime associate Webb and current production editor Bell offer an edited volume culled from the pages of the British periodical Index on Censorship. Founded to challenge political censorship, the original goal of Index was to provide “the noise of publicity outside every detention centre and concentration camp.” Strangling words by denying them an audience effectively kills an author, and Index is a writer’s response to political tyranny, an effort to keep authors from disappearing “into total obscurity and loneliness” so that they “and the names of their works, would remain among the names of the living.” Twenty-five years ago the repressive regimes of the Soviets and their allies were the obvious targets, but throughout its tenure Index has resisted identification with a particular ideology. Equal opportunity gadflies, its contributors have exposed a wide range of threats to freedom throughout the world and have criticized censorship whether a function of political, religious, or social concerns. Familiar names include Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and Rushdie, but the most powerful efforts are not necessarily from the most famous writers: consider the letter from George Mangakis in his Greek prison cell, Ivan Kraus’s satire addressed to Ceausescu, the response of Nigerian Wole Soyinka to Khomeini’s indictment of Rushdie, or Dror Green’s story from inside the Israeli-occupied territories. Essays by Arthur Miller, Judy Blume, and Noam Chomsky cast spotlights on American forms of censorship, and even England is held up for scrutiny by Michael Tippett, John Mortimer, and others. Throughout this volume a unique characteristic of the best political writing is on display: the message is disturbing but simultaneously uplifting, for the simple fact that someone could write about these experiences, however horrible, or make these arguments, however appallingly necessary, indicates there is hope for the achievement of human freedom and dignity in the world.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 1998

ISBN: 0-8076-1441-6

Page Count: 347

Publisher: Braziller

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998

Categories:

EDUCATION

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EDUCATION WITHOUT IMPACT

HOW OUR UNIVERSITIES FAIL THE YOUNG

by George H. Douglas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1992

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Another faithful-oppositionist lament over—and explanation of—the wreckage of American college education, this time from English professor Douglas (Univ. of Illinois; All Aboard!, The Smart Magazines, etc.). Citing Thorstein Veblen, William James, and H.L. Mencken, Douglas argues that the seeds of present woe in undergraduate education were sown back in the 19th century when two things happened: The structure of the university came to be modeled on the business corporation (where ``productivity,'' not individual students, is what mattered); and the Ph.D. (``an imported monstrosity'') became the new qualifying badge for professors, causing ``specialization''—instead of general liberal educating— to become the university's commodity of true prestige. These great historical errors went hand in hand with an erroneous but typically American and efficiency-minded view of education as a passive receiving of information rather than (as in the English tutorial system) an intimate nurturing of individual knowledge and judgment. Douglas sees the student revolts of the 60's not as the cause of present-day ills, but as the moment when the already depersonalized universities ``made the complete adjustment to the masses that had arrived since World War II''—when what was left of liberal education ``was pummeled, shrunk, de-toothed if you will.'' As it's left now, the corporate-style university offers little challenge, intimacy, guidance, or enrichment to undergraduates, its own prior hollowness making it easy prey to the self-serving anticanonists, Marxists, multiculturalists, theorists, and Mandarin specialists who may claim to bring reform but in fact bring only more forced- feeding and less liberating of individual minds than ever. Largely anecdotal in method and based on long, observed experience: a plea for simple intellectual honesty and a return of the human dimension in undergraduate education. Passionate, reasoned, and untendentious—easily deserving a visible place on the Crisis-in-the-Colleges shelf.