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“Rigour” is the Password into the Education Superpower Club
The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way
Amanda Ripley
2013, 307 pages
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1-4516-5442-4
ISBN 978-1-4516-5442-8 (e-book)
Just as we began a new school year, the Alberta government launched the Taskforce for Teaching Excellence to make recommendations for the future of Alberta’s teaching profession. The goal is to ensure that teachers are “more flexible, innovative and learner-centered than ever before.” Even though Alberta is a high-performing jurisdiction in a high-performing country, nothing is ever perfect, but if the taskforce members really want Canada to join the ranks of the education superpowers, they might want to have a read of this provocatively titled book by U.S. author and journalist Amanda Ripley.
Ripley followed three U.S. students who spent a year studying in three of the highest performing educational systems in the world, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. Fifteen-year-old Kim went to Finland for a year, 17-year-old Tom to Poland and 18-year-old Eric to South Korea. Their experiences form a backdrop to Ripley’s examination of how three disparate education systems came to distinguish themselves and why the U.S. system is flagging.
In the last few decades, tiny Finland, with a mere 5 million inhabitants, completely overhauled its education system and became the global model for school reform. How it did so is fascinating. One controversial step was raising the entry requirements for teachers’ college. Instead of turning out too many teachers, the system began producing fewer teachers, but ones that were highly trained and well-educated. Teaching became an elite occupation that accepted only the best, and by extension, produced the best students.
In Poland, the government had to deal with radical change caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reinvention of political and social life in Eastern Europe. Its answer was to delay streaming students into vocational streams and to give schools more authority. As happened in Finland, expectations of students were also raised. The American student Tom recounts being amazed that calculators were not allowed in math class—Polish students did good old-fashioned long division.
South Korea has also produced high-achieving students who score near the top of the world charts in reading, math and science, but its methods sometimes verge on the sadistic. The pressure for students to excel in Korea is exceedingly strong. Ripley tells the story of one young man named Ji, whose mother beat him and denied him food when he did not do as well as she thought he should. Ji stabbed her to death, but he received a much lighter sentence than a murderer normally would because of the outpouring of public support for him. Every Korean knows that life in the country’s secondary schools is merciless—students study all day. After school they go to test-prep classes and after dinner to a yaja, a two-hour session of supervised study. But their day is not done yet. Unbelievably, most of the kids in Eric’s class then went to private tutoring academies called hagwons. Many in Korea decry the pressure cooker that their schools have become and the joylessness of learning. And if it weren’t so sad, the story of the police raiding illegal all-night hagwons and fining teachers for teaching would be funny. Eric, the young U.S. student, was so horrified by the Korean system that he dropped out.
Ripley set out to write a non-boring book about education. She succeeded. Using the U.S. students’ stories harnesses the power of personal narrative, and her examination of the inner workings of the Finnish, Polish and South Korean educational systems is fascinating. Ripley identified several common elements in the success of these three countries. First, teachers demand a lot from students—and they get it. Second, parents play almost no role in schools, but their role at home, reading to children and being seen reading, is closely linked with how well their kids do. They are coaches, not cheerleaders. Third, these countries take education seriously. It matters. The operative word is rigour. The purpose of schools is to help students master complex material, not to tell them that they are all talented, delicate geniuses, and not to give them excuses not to succeed either.
Alberta teachers will find much of interest in these pages, particularly in the first appendix, “How to Spot a World Class Education.” Teachers might also be interested in the story of Andrew Kim, a teacher in South Korea who made $4 million in 2010, mostly through online lecturing. (But with the current state of the province’s finances, proposing this salary as a bargaining item is probably not a great idea.)
Karen Virag is the publications supervisor for the ATA and a freelance writer.
