What it is: “The Smartest Kids in the World” studies how different countries tackle the education problem and what works for each country.
Author Amanda Ripley interviewed several teenagers who left America to attend schools in other countries. By doing so, she got some insight into what American schools are doing right and what other countries are doing right. Not surprisingly, she found that foreign exchange students were surprised at two aspects of the American educational system.
One, Americans placed a huge emphasis on sports to the point where athletics often took precedence over academics. Two, Americans spent far more on technology in the classroom than any other nation in addition to spending the most amount per pupil with little results to show for all this spending.
In South Korea, high schools are known as pressure cookers where students attend school during the day, then attend private tutoring sessions at night, often until midnight. Then they repeat the process all over again. Such forced education wears out students. Despite their high academic scores, such students quickly drop back down once they escape the Korean high school system.
Oddly, one of the top achieving nations in education is Finland. Despite schools in poor areas filled with immigrants, Finland’s school scored near the top. In America, schools often blame poverty and immigration for low test scores, yet in areas in Finland where they had high poverty and a high immigrants population, they simply spent more money on helping all students to the point where many poor students were scoring equally well as students in far wealthier schools.
The key to Finland’s success hinged on the simple idea that if you expect more from students, they’ll often rise to the challenge. Finland’s schools didn’t accept the excuse that poor kids or kids who didn’t know Finnish should do poorly in school. Since they expected poor students and immigrant students to perform just as well as rich Finnish kids in other schools, the kids did actually that.
The basic idea behind Finland’s success is that when you put kids in an environment where success is expected, nearly all of them will succeed. For those on the verge of failing, Finland simply pours massive resources at the child until the child catches up. The expectation is always that the child can catch up, and given the peer pressure that comes from being surrounded by other students who are succeeding, the students generally live up to their expectations.
Jim Rohn, a famous American public speaker once said that you are the average of the five people you hang around the most. That means if you’re hanging around five people who are super achievers, you’ll have to be a super achiever too to fit in with them. If you aren’t, they won’t want to hang around with you any more.
So if you aren’t being challenged in school or by your classmates, it’s time to find new friends. If your local school isn’t challenging you, then visit iTunes University where you can get a free college (and high school) education from schools such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Oxford. Not only will college-level courses challenge you to think and learn about different topics, but they can often make you realize how exciting the world outside of your own region can be.
By expanding your mind with offerings from all over the world through iTunes University, you can virtually hang around other people who may be just as intellectually curious as you are. If you want to dream big, the best chance you have of achieving your dream is to hang around other people who have big dreams of their own.
By providing free college courses through iTunes University, Apple helps make education fun and accessible to everyone. The more people learn, the better off society will be. The less educated people are, the less productive they’ll likely be. So given a choice between improving yourself and striving to reach your dreams, or settling and accepting your current situation filled with people who have low expectations, which path do you think will get you where you want to go?