32 Quotes by Amanda Ripley

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been with very smart, knowledgeable Homeland Security experts who are essentially tasked with saving your life who do not trust you with information. They just don’t. They kind of dismiss the media and the public in one fell swoop.

Finally, it was clear that the real innovation in Korea was not happening in the government or the public schools. It was happening in Korea’s shadow education system – the multimillion-dollar afterschool tutoring complex that Lee was trying to undermine. I realized that, if I wanted to see what a truly free-market education system looked like, I would have.

Without a doubt, American teenagers can perform at the top of the world on a sophisticated test of critical thinking. Students at traditional public high schools that took the test in Fairfax, Virginia, also trounced teenagers around the world.

Suffering accumulates, like debt.

The Iron Child culture was contagious; it was hard for kids and parents to resist the pressure to study more and more. But all the while, they complained that the fixation on rankings and test scores was crushing their spirit, depriving them not just of sleep but of sanity.