Key takeaways from this parenting book by Amanda Ripley
Maths skills tended to better predict future earnings. Math had a way of predicting kids' futures. Teenagers who mastered higher level math classes were far more likely to graduate from college, even when putting aside other factors like race and income. They also earned more money after college.
Why did math matter so much? Some reasons were practical: More and more jobs required familiarity with probability, statistics, and geometry. The other reason was that math was not just math. Math is a language of logic. It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking. There is a right answer, there are rules that must be followed. More than any other subject, math is rigor distilled. Mastering the language of logic helps to embed higher order habits in kids' minds: the ability to reason, for example, to detect patterns and make informed guesses. These kinds of skills had rising value in a world in which information was cheap and messy.
In Polish math class, they had learned tricks that had become automatic, so their brains were freed up to do the harder work. It was the difference between being fluent in language and not.
He didn't know that math could be cosmically beautiful and something he could master with hard work, time and persistence, just the way he'd mastered Chekhov.
A student's race and family income mattered but how much such things mattered varied wildly from country to country. Students from private school, did not, statistically speaking, add much value
In essence, PISA revealed what should have been obvious but was not: that spending on education did not make kids smarter. Everything - everything - depended on what teachers, parents, and students did with those investments. As in all other large organizations, from GE to the Marines, excellence depended on execution, the hardest things to get wrong.
Money did not lead to more learning either. In the education superpowers, parents were not necessarily more involved in their children's education, just differently involved. And most encouragingly, the smart kids had not always been so smart. Change, it turned out, could come within a single generation.
PISA demanded fluency in problem solving and the ability to communicate; in other words the basic skills I needed to do my job and take care of my family in a world choked with information and subject to sudden economic change.
Rigor mattered. Koreans understood that mastering difficult academic content was important. They didn't take shortcuts, especially in math. They assumed that performance was mostly a product of hard work - not God given talent. This attitude meant that all kids tried harder and it was more valuable to a country than gold or oil.
Korean schools existed for one and only one purpose: so that children could master complex academic material. US schools by contrast,were about many things, only one of which was learning This lack of focus made it easy to lose sight of what mattered most.
Other parental efforts yielded big returns, the surveys suggested. When children were young, parents who read to them every day or almost every day had kids who performed much better in reading, all around the world. What did reading to your kids mean? Done well, it meant teaching them about the world - sharing stories about faraway places, about smoking volcanoes and little boys who were sent to bed without dinner. It meant asking them questions about the book, questions that encouraged them to think for themselves. It meant sending a signal to kids about the importance of not just reading but of learning about all kinds of new things.
As kids got older, the parental involvement that seemed to matter most was different but related. All over the world, parents who discussed movies, books and current affairs with their kids had teenagers who performed better in reading. Here again, parents who engaged their kids in conversation about things larger than themselves were essentially teaching their kids to become thinking adults. Unlike volunteering in schools, those kinds of parental efforts delivered clear and convincing results, even across different countries and different income levels.
In fact, fifteen year olds whose parents talked about complicated social issues with them not only scored better on PISA but reported enjoying reading more overall. What parents did with children at home mattered more than what parents did to hep out at school.
Korean parenting, by contrast, were coaches. Coach parents cared deeply about their children too. Yet they spent less time attending school events and more time training their children at home: reading to them, quizzing them on their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner, and pushing them to try harder. They saw education as one of their jobs.
Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly with a work book, not organically.
Parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored higher points on PISA. By Contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. And at least one high impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all: If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading too. Kids could see what parents valued and it mattered more than what parents said.
A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self control or endurance - experiences that mattered as much or more than academic schools.
Actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. IT had a toxic effect. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic and rare.
Adults didn't have to be stern or aloof to help kids learn. In fact, just asking children about their school days and showing genuine interest in what they were learning could have the same effect on PISA scores as hours of private tutoring. Asking serious questions about a child's book had more value than congratulating the child for finishing it, in other words.
Authoritative is a mash up of authoritarian and permissive. These parents inhabit the sweet spot between the two: they were warm, responsive and close ot their kids but as their children got older, they gave them freedom to explore and to fail and to make their own choices. Throughout their kids' upbringing, authoritative parents also had clear bright limits rules they did not negotiate.
Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect. Authoritative parents trained their kids to be resilient and it seemed to work.
In Korea and Finland, despite all their differences, everyone - kids, parents and teachers - saw getting an education as a serious quest, more important than sports or self esteem. Everything was more demanding through and through. Kids had more freedom too. This freedom was important and it wasn't a gift. By definition, rigorous work required failure; you simply could not do it without failing. That meant that teenagers had the freedom to fail when they were still young enough to learn how to recover. When they didn't work hard, they got worse grades. The consequences were clear and reliable.
The fundamental difference was a psychological one. 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. Other things mattered too, but nothing mattered as much. The most important difference Id seen so far was the drive of students and their families. IT was viral and it mattered. Kids feed off each other. This feedback loop started in kindergarden and just grew more powerful each year, for better and for worse.
In the education superpowers, each child knew the importance of an education,
The teachers, everything is based on the teachers. We need good teachers - well prepared and well chosen.
In an automated global economy, kids needed to be driven;; they need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.
To give our kids the kinds of education they deserved, we had to first agree that rigor mattered most of all; that school existed to help kids learn to think, to work hard, and yes to fail. All children must learn rigorous higher order thinking to thrive in the modern world. The only way to do that is by creating a serious intellectual culture in schools.
