Amanda Ripley > Quotes

“I’d been looking around the world for clues as to what other countries were doing right, but the important distinctions were not about spending or local control or curriculum; none of that mattered very much. Policies mostly worked in the margins. 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.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Understanding people doesn’t change them. It’s not nearly enough. But almost no one changes until they feel heard. That’s the third paradox of conflict. People need to believe you understand them, even as they realize you disagree, before they will hear you.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“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 to make informed guesses. Those kinds of skills had rising value in a”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“It was interesting to note that higher standards were seen not as an investment in students; they were seen, first and foremost, as a threat to teachers.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“They suspected that children learned best through undirected free play—and that a child’s psyche was sensitive and fragile. During the 1980s and 1990s, American parents and teachers had been bombarded by claims that children’s self-esteem needed to be protected from competition (and reality) in order for them to succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In most of the countries where parents took the PISA survey, parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse in reading. 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.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the po­lice and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

“But first, before anyone else, regular people were on the scene, saving one another. They did incredible things, these regular people. They lifted rubble off sur­vivors with car jacks. They used garden hoses to force air into voids where people were trapped. In fact, as in most disasters, the vast majority of rescues were done by ordinary folks.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

“Most of us do not feel heard much of the time. That’s because most people don’t know how to listen. We jump to conclusions. We think we understand when we don’t. We tee up our next point, before the other person has finished talking.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“The human brain works by identifying patterns. It uses information from the past to understand what is happening in the present and to anticipate the future. This strategy works elegantly in most situations. But we inevitably see patterns where they don’t exist. In other words, we are slow to recognize exceptions. There is also the peer-pressure factor. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous, and they almost always turn out to be innocuous. If we behave otherwise, we risk social embarrassment by overreacting. So we err on the side of underreacting.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

“These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because reg­ular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

“In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren't nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn't matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

“Our disaster personalities are more complex and ancient than we think. But they are also more mal­leable.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

“We had the schools we wanted, in a way. Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that their kids be assigned more challenging reading or that their kindergarteners learn math while they still loved numbers. They did show up to complain about bad grades, however. And they came in droves, with video cameras and lawn chairs and full hearts, to watch their children play sports.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one. No one was content, and rightly so. Educating all kids to high levels was hard, and every country—every one—still had work to do.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why. Why did these countries have this consensus around rigor? In the education superpowers, every child knew the importance of an education. These countries had experienced national failure in recent memory; they knew what an existential crisis felt like. In many U.S. schools, however, the priorities were muddled beyond recognition. Sports were central to American students’ lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers. Exchange students agreed almost universally on this point. Nine out of ten international students I surveyed said that U.S. kids placed a higher priority on sports, and six out of ten American exchange students agreed with them. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the same schools. While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math. The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated. Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too. Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher 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. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said. Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were. Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. 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 skills. The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study, 85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to assure them they were smart. However, the 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, the opposite of what parents intended. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” 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.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Why were American kids consistently underestimated in math? In middle school, Kim and Tom had both decided that math was something you were either good at, or you weren’t, and they weren’t. Interestingly, that was not the kind of thing that most Americans said about reading. If you weren’t good at reading, you could, most people assumed, get better through hard work and good teaching. But in the United States, math was, for some reason, considered more of an innate ability, like being double-jointed.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“In most countries, attending some kind of early childhood program (i.e., preschool or prekindergarten) led to real and lasting benefits. On average, kids who did so for more than a year scored much higher in math by age fifteen (more than a year ahead of other students).”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“There is nothing more important to a person who is undergoing a life crisis than to be understood,” Gary likes to say. Being understood is more important than money or property. It’s more important even than winning.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Since 9/11, the U.S. government has sent over $23 billion to states and cities in the name of homeland security. Almost none of that money has gone toward intelli­gently enrolling regular people like you and me in the cause. Why don’t we tell people what to do when the nation is on Orange Alert against a terrorist attack—in­stead of just telling them to be afraid?”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

“Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

“Another simple but powerful tactic is distraction. Intentionally focus your attention on something else, even in the midst of conflict. Sometimes, Curtis imagines the young men he works with as they looked when they were small children, innocent and sweet. “I look at everyone and see my grandchild,” he said. “That’s the state I have to see them in.” He recategorizes them in his mind. They are not gangbangers. They are people who were children once, who lost a first tooth, who needed help tying their shoes, who liked to dance.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“In river rescues, members of the Kansas City Fire Department rescue squad yell profanity-laced threats at victims before they get to them. If they don't, the victim will grab on to them and push them under the water in a mad scramble to stay afloat. "We try to get their attention. And we don't always use the prettiest language," says Larry Young, a captain in the rescue division. "I hope I don't offend you by saying this. But if I approach Mrs. Suburban Housewife and say, 'When I get to you, do not fucking touch me! I will leave you if you touch me!' she tends to listen.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

“A sense of empathy, combined with an identity as someone who helps and takes risks, may predispose one for heroism.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

“Success,” as Winston Churchill once said, “is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Emotions are more contagious than any virus. You can catch them through stories, without any human contact. And of all the emotions people experience in conflict, hatred is one of the hardest to work with. If humiliation is the nuclear bomb of emotions, hatred is the radioactive fallout. That’s because hatred assumes the enemy is immutable.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness”
― Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why