The Smartest Kids In The World: And How They Got That Way Quotes
"You cannot measure what counts in education—the human qualities."
"We were not looking for answers to equations or to multiple choice questions. We were looking for the ability to think creatively."
"Without data, you are just another person with an opinion."
"PISA is not a traditional school test. It's actually challenging, because you have to think."
"Education acted like an antipoverty vaccine in Korea, rendering family background less and less relevant to kids' life chances over time."
"The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers."
"The experience had convinced him that the world needed an even smarter test, one that could measure the kind of advanced thinking and communication skills that people needed to thrive in the modern world."
"Kids learned a lot, but they spent a ridiculous amount of time doing so."
"The high-stakes test was, in practice, accessible only to the sons of the elite, who could afford the ancient version of test prep."
"Kids who scored poorly on the PISA reading test were far more likely to drop out of high school."
"There was more than one way to become a superpower, Lee warned; take care to choose the high road."
"Math is a language of logic. It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking."
"Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." – Winston Churchill
"The truth was that American adults didn’t like math or think it was critical to kids’ life chances."
"If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too."
"The education superpowers believed in rigor. People in these countries agreed on the purpose of school: School existed to help students master complex academic material."
"The most important difference I’d seen so far was the drive of students and their families. It was viral, and it mattered more than I’d expected."
"The lesson wasn’t that sports couldn’t coexist with education; it was that sports had nothing to do with education."
"Wealth had made rigor unnecessary in the United States, historically speaking."
"Character was malleable, more malleable in fact than IQ."
"Conscientiousness on a survey seemed like a trifling matter. In life, it was a big deal."
"The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why."
"In most U.S. high schools, however, only a minority of students actually played sports."
"Mastery of math never made anyone get to work on time, finish a thesis, or use a condom."
"The United States did have too much poverty; minority students were not learning enough."
"I like that [in South Korea]. The harder I work, the more I make."
"The most radical difference was that students signed up for specific teachers, not just hagwons, so the most respected teachers got the most students."
"In hagwons, teachers were free agents. They did not need to be certified."
"The really good teachers are hard to retain—and hard to manage. You need to protect their egos."
"Without hagwons, Korea would nosedive on PISA."
"I think they’re better because they teach more effectively."
"To meet the award benchmarks, Jenny and her classmates had to run an eight-minute mile and do forty-four sit-ups in sixty seconds."
"They took school more seriously because it was more serious."
"In every case, that agreement had been born out of crisis: economic imperatives that had focused the national mind."
"To give our kids the kind of education they deserved, we had to first agree that rigor mattered most of all."
"The average BASIS student not only outperformed the typical U.S. student but outscored the average student in Finland, Korea, and Poland, as well."
"All children must learn rigorous higher-order thinking to thrive in the modern world."