A Day in the Life of a Korean

Ripley thought that Eric, the second person in which she was interviewing and following in their journey, had a very interesting background. He came from Minnetonka, Minnesota. A place where education was at very high standards along with very fancy high schools. His education and course load was similar to that of a college graduates. Eric wanted to challenge himself more, so he decided to move to a foreign country where Math, his favorite subject, would be taught in a different manner and also have a different meaning. Coming from a high school that ranked closely to Korea in Math performance, he decided to study abroad there for a year.

Eric didn’t really expect to surprise himself with what he was going to see in Korea. Stuffed subways, busy roads, overpopulation, and bad environmental conditions. He also expected the schools to be somewhat similar to the rest of the atmosphere. His host family tried as best they could to accommodate his needs. Eric was quickly situated to the atmosphere due to his expectations and preparedness. But he did not expect to see the totally different conditions of the students that were studying at the school itself.

About 70% of the class was sleeping when the teacher started class, Eric was baffled. He could not believe that this was what the students did in class to get such good math test grades and math skills. It simply did not make sense. He asked one of the Korean students how they pulled it off. They countered his question by asking him how many hours he spent at school. He was too dumbfounded to answer, so the Korean clarified his doubts by giving him a mind blowing number of hours that they had to stay in school… 16 hours. Unbelievable, all they did after school was finished, was study or go to special tutions for each subject. They would only come home to get a partial night’s rest, then it was back to school first thing in the morning. Kids in Korea practically lived at school.

The Later Years and Legacy of Thomas Jefferson

        Jefferson left the post of president in the good hands of his close friend and long-time political ally, James Madison. Following his departure from the most powerful position in the government of the United States in 1809, Thomas Jefferson would spend the remainder of his life in Monticello, his manse in rural Charlottesville, Virginia that was an architectural representation of his character. Jefferson began the construction of Monticello in 1768 as his private home and finally finished it after the end of his presidency in 1809. Meacham described Monticello, stating that “the eleven-thousand-square-foot, thirty-three-room-house… in which he woke every morning was his joy,” and was filled with the “artifacts and emblems of America’s natural and political worlds.” The house contained numerous portraits, busts, statues, and artifacts of figures such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Voltaire, and Jefferson himself. “Anything represented within Monticello was meaningful to Jefferson in some way to another.”          

          

          Jefferson’s final effort in his life was the founding of the University of Virginia. Meacham describes that for Jefferson, “education had been a perennial interest.” Jefferson further mentioned in a letter, “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people,” further describing the importance he placed on education.  Jefferson began the construction of the University of Virginia in 1817 not far from his home, Monticello, where it would endure and education numerous generations of students into the present day.

          Over the course of his life, Thomas Jefferson accomplished a number of marvelous feats. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as Secretary of State, Vice President, and President. He doubled the size of the continental United States, kept the nation out of war, and founded a university. Yet, of all the great accomplishments that Jefferson is remembered for today, he listed three on his gravestone as what he believed to be his greatest accomplishments; those which he chose to be truly representative of his legacy. They include authorship of the Declaration of Independence, authorship of the Virginia bill of religious liberty, and founder of the University of Virginia. These listed accomplishments tell us a lot about what Jefferson chose to be remembered for. They tell us that Jefferson was a staunch supporter for individual rights, in both freedom and religion, and that he placed education at highest importance. In this manner Jefferson chose to perpetuate his legacy primarily with the importance of freedom and education, two of the qualities that have enabled him to reach his high status in early American society and have allowed him to make the weighty contributions in society and science that he had in his day. 

      

The Third President of the United States

         After a close election for the seat of the presidency in 1800, Thomas Jefferson was ultimately elected as the third President of the United States. Beginning his first term as president in 1801, Jefferson was at last at the helm of the American Experiment that he began. According to John Meacham's description of Jefferson's governing style, “Jefferson governed personally” and “preferred to project power without being showy about it.”

          During his tenure as President, Jefferson accomplished a number of notable feats, including the reducing federal taxes and spending, ending the uncouth practices of the Barbary pirates, funding the expedition of Lewis and Clark to explore the western region of the North American continent, and most notably doubling the size of the continental United States with the Louisiana Purchase as a result of his political maneuvers. Furthermore as president, Jefferson tried to redefine the balance of power between the state and federal governments, shifting power from the national government to the states, according his Democratic-Republican beliefs. Although not always true to his philosophy regarding strict adherence to the Constitution, as seen by his purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Thomas Jefferson was a visionary who sought to aggrandize the fame of the United States of America. The contradiction between Jefferson's actions and ideology can be further exculpated in light of the tense political climate at the time. During Jefferson’s presidency, there was intense partisan politics between the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party. Moreover the Napoleonic Wars that were occurring in Europe complicated the foreign policy of the United States as relations with one European power would lead to antagonism from another. Jefferson, to keep his nation out of war, attempted to keep America neutral to the best of his ability.

          In this manner, Jefferson redefined politics in the United States. Jefferson, unlike the presidents before him, did a better job a placing the safety of his country ahead of his prestige as president. By viewing his country from a global picture, Jefferson was one of the first presidents who sought to solidify the United States at the international stage, as seen by his dealings with the Barbary Pirates, the Louisiana Purchase, and Neutrality. In doing so Jefferson developed a unique foreign policy that was continued by his successors. Furthermore, by accomplishing these feats, Jefferson reshaped the presidency of the United States into a position of both concealed power and effective leadership, an ideal that has been followed by numerous presidents since.

Jefferson at the National Stage

          In the years that followed the American Revolution, Jefferson held a number of political positions starting from delegate in the Continental Congress, to governor of Virginia, to ambassador to France under the Articles of Confederation government, to the Office of Secretary of State under the Constitutional government of George Washington, and later to the post of the Vice President under John Adams.  

          During the Articles of Confederation Government, Jefferson was appointed as the Ambassador to France. Required by his position to live in France in the five years following 1785, Jefferson naturally became a francophile and was enticed with French culture. According to Meacham, Jefferson “was a tireless advocate for things American while abroad, and a promoter of things European while at home,” and that “he created a role for himself as both intermediary and arbiter.”

          During his stay in France, Jefferson received from his colleague James Madison a draft of the newly written United States Constitution. Although Jefferson “did not like the omission of a declaration (bill) of rights,” Jefferson replied, “we must be contended to travel on towards perfection, step by step,” demonstrating his belief that reaching success in politics involved experimentation.

         Jefferson continued to practice this belief over the course of the following years, during his tenure in the positions of Secretary of State and Vice President. A strict adherent to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Jefferson was a firm believer in individual liberties and was wary of any hints of monarchical culture that tended to appear in politics. For this reason, Jefferson did not support the Federalist political views of the Presidents George Washington and John Adams, and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, which supported a strong national government with a national bank and the strengthening of relations with Great Britain. According to Meacham, Jefferson was unsettled by “the quasi-monarchical culture growing up around President Washington,” and saw Hamilton as “the embodiment of the deepest of republican fears: as a man who might be willing to sacrifice the American undertaking in liberty to the expediency of authority.” 

    

          Thus in order to prevent what he believed to be a potential threat of monarchy in the United States federal government, Jefferson conducted a revolutionary act by effectively establishing an opposition party of politicians, known as the Democratic-Republicans. Members of the Democratic-Republican Party, which included James Madison, Elbridge Gerry, and Jefferson himself, supported his view of strict adherence to Constitutional doctrine. In this manner, Jefferson altered the future of American politics and the American experiment by popularizing the opposition party, an institution still held in American politics today. This is yet another manner in which Thomas Jefferson has impacted the societal beliefs toward politics in the United States. 

Jefferson's Early Political Career

          As mentioned before, Jefferson consistently implemented the skills that he acquired in his education in his political career. Through contacts with members of the Virginia political circle in Williamsburg, such as royal governor Francis Faquier, Jefferson was soon elected as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. During this time period, however, tensions between the British and the Americans began to increase. Great Britain, incurring massive debts following the French and Indian War, began levying large taxes on commodities upon its American colonies to relieve themselves of the debt. The Americans, upset with the heavy taxation, began to protest against the British. The young Thomas Jefferson, speaking for the views of the American public, wrote the article, based on the Enlightenment ideas of individual liberty, which led him to fame. It was titled  A Summary View of the Rights of British America (or simply The Summary View). In it Jefferson mentioned, “ ‘… let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.’ ” According to Meacham, this work “moved Jefferson to the front ranks of the cause [of revolution], taking an advanced position.”

          As The Summary View circulated through the colonies, Jefferson quickly became a celebrity, and rose through the political hierarchy. By 1775, with the American Revolution underway following the battles of Lexington and Concord, Jefferson was elected a delegate to represent Virginia in the Second Continental Congress. By the year 1776, the war against taxation had transformed into a war for independence and the congressional delegates fostered a unanimous decision to break from the mother country. Jefferson, for his famed writing abilities, was assigned by his fellow members of congress to draft a Declaration of Independence. In this document, Jefferson utilized Enlightenment principles learned from his education, stating, “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and further mentioned that, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”

          

          In using these words, Jefferson, reminiscent of a scientist, effectively initiated the American experiment, revolving around the creation of a democratic government under which all men would be created equal. However as no such form of government existed at that moment in time, it was left to Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers, by following the principles that he described in the Declaration of Independence, to conduct the American experiment through politics. Since his ideas were deeply embedded in the Declaration, Jefferson would develop a political ideology that practiced a strict observation of its principles. In this manner, Jefferson contributed to science by creating a new conservative American political ideology that was to be practiced for many years to come.   

           

The answer to our question

As I’ve previously hinted, George Johnson is a man that serves a very interesting purpose in helping draw some conclusions regarding how public figures and education can impact societal attitudes toward the sciences. He is a man that has a foot both inside and outside of the scientific community; he plays a role in both educating the public regarding cancer, and therefore building up societal respect of the sciences, while also uncovering some of the dirty secrets of statistics and those very same sciences; he is capable of writing a gripping story that conveys both information and emotion. He is therefore, in many ways, the ultimate answer to our question.

Through his book, Johnson conveys the story of Nancy’s survival of cancer as well as his own story of racing to uncover information about cancer so fluidly, combining the two in the method that is both interesting and easy to follow. He thereby appeals to countless audiences: those that are interested in the raw science, those who can relate to the horror of battling cancer, and those that enjoy a good story, to name just a few. He uses first-person emotions in a book laden with third-person style information, blending so many styles of writing together into one book. And the lasting impact is a book that few can put down, yet few can stop learning from.

            In doing so, Johnson clearly establishes himself as an important public figure, capable of educating a wide audience on a subject that is so central to numerous scientific debates at this time. He is capable of manipulating his platform, utilizing the talent and knowledge that he was blessed with, and greatly impacting his readers. And above all, answers our question. So, what impact can important political figures and education have on societal attitudes toward the sciences? Well, with the right techniques, just about any impact that is desired. In the case of Johnson, that lasting impact was the establishment of awe and mystique with regards to attitudes towards cancer, yet also resentment towards the crazy impacts that the sciences can have on a person’s life.

Johnson himself is the answer that we have sought throughout this entire project. He is a man that, through his literature, has made himself an impressive ambassador between literature and the sciences; he has crafted a book worthy of the New York Times’ attention, and in doing so, has modified the attitudes of society towards the sciences.

The truth about hospitals

Johnson provides us with an in-depth explanation of his experience at a local hospital, in which he described his encounters with doctors and nurses as rather unsettling, with many of these people clearly regarding Nancy’s life-or-death situation rather nonchalantly. Perhaps this is what occurs when one deals with numerous such situations on a day-to-day basis, but some things mentioned by these people are alarming and illogical, to say the least. For instance, Johnson and his wife “asked about a referral to an oncologist. That would be premature, the surgeon told us, until we knew what kind of cancer this was. She actually said that” (Johnson 36) and had an earlier experience with a doctor in which “she had been told by her doctor that she was experiencing unusually early menopause. The sign was irregular menstrual bleeding, and I still wonder why that was not taken as a warning…” (Johnson 36).

Such experiences in a hospital are downright puzzling, and unfortunately, do not seem to be all that uncommon in society. We are often told that a visit to the doctor will solve our problems, but in reality, there are not-so-infrequent lapses in those systems. As a result, the public gains a negative perception of hospitals, and concurrently, of the sciences.

And thus, Johnson presents another method in which perception can impact societal attitudes towards the sciences. People are naturally skeptical of things that they don’t understand; that is the reason why Johnson embarked on the journey of learning everything that he possibly could about cancer and wrote this book, as he said in preface of the book. As a result, those that are not involved in the sciences come to distrust it greatly, and a fair number leave hospitals with contempt for the medical bills they are forced to pay and the treatment that does not meet their expectations; Johnson and his wife were no different. Due to this fact, public opinion is greatly able to sway societal attitudes towards the sciences, often in a negative manner.

This idea, as well as some of those that were previously examined, help to illustrate the exclusiveness of the sciences. There are a very select group of individuals that understand them and a few more that respect them, but generally speaking, those that are outside of the scientific community tend to not trust them. As a result, we see a dichotomy of attitudes towards the sciences: overwhelmingly positive for those that are members of the scientific “community,” and skeptical for those that are not considered part of that same community. It is difficult to discern which community Johnson falls in; he is clearly very educated on the subject of cancer, but that only became the case as he excavated information as a result of his wife’s diagnosis. Perhaps Johnson is best described as a person that was not a member of the scientific community prior to writing this book, but his research for the literary work has clearly brought him into that community.

How to become the Smartest Kids in the World

Seeing the differences these kids have gone through, Amanda Ripley concluded that the main reason for how the smartest kids in the world got to be the way they are, was because of the quality of education they received. The foundation of any education is based on how well the curriculum was taught to the student. The United States needs to improve on the quality of education that is received by the people going into the teaching field. There should be a source of competition in the field so that only the scholarly men and women are assigned as educators in schools. The solid and structural understanding of the subject that is being taught should be tested for each and everyone that applies to be a teacher. When the quality of teaching increases in the United States, the quality of education, jobs, and nation ranking in certain areas such as math and science, will increase. Well educated teachers causes a ripple effect creating an educated nation.

Fate: the solution to all

In discussing Nancy’s cancer throughout the book, Johnson repeatedly refers to the fact that she did seemingly everything in her power to avoid cancer, but was simply unable to do so. He presents a host of Nancy’s activities, such as keeping up to date with the healthy diets advertized in magazines, exercising, and maintaining good health overall, but she unfortunately still developed cancer. These occurrences, in addition to the minimal statistical advantage of all advertized methods of reducing one’s chances of developing cancer, led Johnson to discuss the concept of fate.

Johnson’s argument and implication of fate throughout the book has based on the points outlined above; or, in other words, the general concept that there is a limit to what one can control. This could be further paraphrased by saying that there exists a concept of fate because no one person is capable of knowing everything that will impact his/her life. It is possible to be knowledgeable of everything in hindsight, but the reality is that nobody is capable of knowing everything that could possibly impact his/her future.

This concept of fate is one that is a battle between scientists and religious folks. At a fundamental level, many religions were introduced to the world at least partly due to the concept of fate; due to the idea that people did not like the fact that there existed events that they could not fully explain, and therefore created religions, many of which are centered around “superhuman” beings that are capable of controlling the things that we are unable to control. Scientists will provide you countless bits of evidence to contradict the ability of these “superhuman” beings to exist and will propose theories such as evolution that clearly run contrary to beliefs that are central to certain religions. Regardless of how convincing these bits of evidence are, it is nearly impossible for scientists to provide enough evidence to be sure of something (another application of statistics), and thus, those who favor the concept of fate will never believe the inferences that can be drawn from these bits of evidence.

From this, we can examine yet another method by which education and public figures can impact societal attitudes towards the sciences. Based upon their religious beliefs and personal beliefs on fate, public figures that have a significant audience are capable of encouraging attitudes of either trust or distrust of the sciences. Similarly, education styles exist in which religion is deeply incorporated with study, creating a situation in which distrust of the sciences can run wild, figuratively speaking. And as a result, the sciences are considerably impacted by various views of fate, a significant source of disagreement in American society.

Polish People with Integrated Calculators

Tom’s story was quite different as well. He wanted to study in a place where there was historic battle or historic event that took place. Growing up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he learned so much about the bloody battle that took place. He always wanted to get more information about events by actually going to the scene of action and acquiring more information there.

By the end of his senior year in high school, Tom set his eyes on Poland. He was huge fan of literature, and he had already read The Pianist twice that year. He wanted to go to a place in Eastern Europe where the romantic language flowed like that of the books he had been reading. Poland was more than perfect in fitting all of that criteria.

Tom wasn’t the brightest math student. He didn’t expect such a minor setback to be a problem for him because he was an exchange student and also because he went there for the history of the country. He was gravely mistaken. Tom didn’t know that Poland ranked 19th in the world for education. The only way that Tom understood that was through brutal realization a observation.

When asked to solve a problem on the board, he would always find a way to get out of the situation so he didn’t have to embarrass himself in front of the Polish kids. But one day, his teacher insisted that he try the problem, Tom that it was impossible to solve the problem without a calculator which wasn’t allowed to be used in Polish schools. He got shown how to do the problem in his head by a Polish student who taught him tricks and shortcuts to make problems easier. Tom was surprised by the amount of brainpower that Poland kids possessed.

Jefferson's Education

          To understand how Jefferson impacted the history of the United States of America in his later years, it is necessary to first understand how his education and life during his formative years enabled him to do this.

  

          Thomas Jefferson was born to Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph in 1743. Raised on a wealthy Virginian plantation, Jefferson “grew up as the eldest son of a prosperous, cultured, and sophisticated family.” Through his father’s respectable library in his study, the curious young Thomas Jefferson had access to a respectable collection of works written by Shakespeare, and others such as Paul de Rapin-Throyas’ History of England. Meacham includes about Jefferson,“ ‘When young, I was passionately fond of reading books of history and travels,’ Thomas Jefferson wrote” and “[books] offered the young Jefferson literary passage to larger worlds.” In his childhood, Jefferson received a holistic education from his tutors in subjects that included the classics, French, literature, history, philosophy, and the art of the violin. Meacham writes,      “Jefferson valued his education… remarking that… he would take the classical training his father arranged for him over the estate his father left him.” Furthermore, “Jefferson was always asking questions … learned all he could… [and] would soon be known as a ‘walking encyclopedia.’ ”

          When Jefferson was fourteen years old, his father passed away, and he was “propelled into the role…of man of the house.” Influenced by his father, Thomas Jefferson learned at an early age to become “an unflinching, resilient aristocrat,” an art of power that he brought with him to his career in politics in his later years.

          

          At the age of seventeen Jefferson enrolled in the College of William and Mary to continue his education. Located in Williamsburg, Virginia, then the colony capital and heart of politics in Virginia, “William and Mary [for Jefferson] was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of the like-minded, and savoring teachers who seem to be ambassadors from other, richer, brighter worlds.” According to Meacham, “it was said that Jefferson studied fifteen hours a day, rising at dawn and reading until two o’clock each morning.” Over the course of his college education, Jefferson became influenced by the works of a number of great individuals including Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke, believing them the “greatest men the world had ever produced” . Jefferson appreciated the scientific ideas and principles of Bacon and Newton as well as Locke’s theories on individual liberty and government, which greatly shaped his political ideology.

          With this thorough education that Jefferson received during his childhood and college years, he developed an outlook on society, based on the views of Locke, which held the liberty of the people as its highest regard. He also took to his endeavors an experimenting approach similar to that of Newton, with which he conducted politics in his later years. During this time, Jefferson also developed unparalleled strength in the art of the written word, which he would become most famous for. He also, at a young age, developed a love for the arts and architecture and learned to be a leader at a young age. Jefferson, only with these skills that he received in the early years of his life, was he able impact society in the way he did in the future.    

The power of one

As children, many of us are told that we are one in a million. That we are unique. That there is nobody like us in the entire world. And we accept all of that to be true. In the world of cancer, though, one in a million is a monstrous proportion; one in ten trillion is the cancerous equivalent of the human one in a million.

As Johnson progresses through countless expeditions in which he attempts to find early origins of different types of cancer, he continually flashes back to the present, during which his wife Nancy is recovering from a metastasized cancer of her own. Throughout all of these flashbacks, Johnson repeatedly discusses the power of one cell in the body, in addition to the complexity of the cancer as a whole. For instance, he stated “Random events—triggered by a cosmic ray, a carcinogenic chemical, or just plain dumb luck---must have altered the DNA inside one of Nancy’s cells, causing it to lose touch” (Johnson 38) and “Inside my body, 10 trillion cells (these tiny Maxwell's demons) are battling the same inevitable slump toward entropy. It is eerie to think that inside each one—invisible to the eye—so much is happening” (Johnson 204). Johnson could not have used a more perfect word to describe the apparent paradox: eerie.

The fact that humans are at the mercy of even one cell in a trillion is utterly ironic when the extent of our evolution as a species is considered. We are a species that has evolved tremendously over the years, growing in sophistication, in size, in mental capacity, and in countless other ways other the years. And yet, there are countless diseases that continue to plague us, and we have still not evolved to be out of our own way; one carcinogen is capable of mutating one cell in our body, which, under the right circumstances, is capable of causing a debilitating disease that can kill us. This point is one that is clearly close to Johnson’s heart, and one that both he and I cannot fully believe.

As it pertains to our question of research (regarding how public figures and education have impacted societal attitudes towards the sciences), this fact provides an indirect but not insignificant point. That is, the idea that one individual is unique and capable of doing anything, which is so often embedded in American culture and often times is accepted as “truth” when that is not necessarily the case, is very much true in complex organisms studied in the sciences, as each cell has a very complex set of processes and a set of characteristics that make it unique from others, yet also capable of derailing an entire organism. These parallels are difficult to ignore; both the sciences and American culture are reflective of the power of the individual, which perhaps explains some of why science is emphasized so much in American education. The book sheds light on one half of this comparison, giving the reader a peek into how societal attitudes and sciences can be so interrelated.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (An Overview)

Introductory Post

          This is my introductory post and is separate from the following five posts in which I will analyze that book I read. Here, I will give a brief description of the book that I read for the outside reading project and will describe how I plan to analyze it according to the question that we are studying.    
            
          I read the book Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham. It is a biography of our Founding Father Thomas Jefferson. The book describes and analyzes the life of Jefferson, a man remembered today for intellect and an appetite for learning, his skill with the pen in writing a numerous famous works such as the Declaration of Independence, and for his tenures in a number of important leadership positions, especially as the third President of the United States. The book makes clear distinctions between Jefferson’s personal and political life, yet masterfully combines these aspects to holistically portray Jefferson as both a man and as an American legend. In this manner, I believed that the book provided an excellent illustration of the Thomas Jefferson and allowed me to thoroughly understand his persona and his character. By including a number of primary sources, John Meacham, in this work, further provides a first-hand understanding of how Thomas Jefferson and his society impacted each other over the course of Jefferson’s life.
           
            In this assignment, I am studying how Thomas Jefferson influenced and impacted his American society in regards to his achievements in politics, science, architecture, and a number of other intellectual fields of his interest. As John Meacham has divided Jefferson’s life according to different periods on his life, I too will study Jefferson’s achievements according to a similar approach. I have divided Jefferson’s life in to five sections that include: his youth and education, his entry and rise in the field of politics, his early presence in the national political arena, the years of his presidency, and his life afterwards. By using examples from Meacham’s text and studying Thomas Jefferson according to this approach, I believe that we can truly understand how Jefferson, over the course of his life, impacted attitudes toward the sciences in his/our society. 

Why is Finland the Smartest Country in the World?

Amanda Ripley followed the lives of 3 people throughout the book. Each student of which decided to study abroad before going to college. Each student of which was interested in seeing why there was such huge difference education between their country and the one they would be travelling to. They had their own hypothesis on why there would be such a distinction, but none of them expected the actual experience that they got.

Kim’s journey was one that Ripley followed. She was a 11 year old girl that was very curious about how education impacted her family’s life. Her mother was a elementary school teacher, so Kim was always around schoolwork and PTA meetings. She got exposed to the education system a little more than other kids. Growing up in a place like Sallisaw, Oklahoma, Kim saw that education played a minor role in everyone’s lives. But she discovered in high school that that was not the case, she was living in city where educating children was a very high struggle.

She decided to do some research on the most educated countries around the world. Within a few clicks and some more surfing of the web, Kim found that Finland was the smartest country in the world. This seemed very bizarre to her, Finland? Why would a country which was known so little have the best brains in the world? The only that she could figure out the answer to this question was to go to the country and study there. Quite the difficult feat to perform, but Kim wasn’t a little girl, she had the ambition which sparked the plug to do what she wanted. With the help of her mother and family, she managed raise a total of 10 grand to study in Finland for a year. Kim was very excited to see a high tech classroom with brilliant teachers.

Only about 50% of her expectations were correct. There were brilliant teachers, but they were not teaching in a 21st century classroom. Kim could believe her eyes, the standards of the school looked far worse than her poorly run high school back in Oklahoma. Is this really the place where the smartest kids get their education? There was so much confusion. Kim was in the same state until she experienced a class and what their curriculum was. Then she understood why Finland was number one. There was actually a common core at Finland. Teachers practically had a doctorate in the subject they were teaching. Students received a high quality education from the content that they were learning.

Statistics Stink

            “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said in a quote that is mentioned, without fail, at the beginning of every statistics course. This is so because statistics, contrary to public opinion, can so easily be used as a form of opinion; it does not take much effort to find a statistic that supports a claim that you want to make. And in the world of cancer and medicine, that is a very dangerous proposition.

            Throughout The Cancer Chronicles, George Johnson mentions countless examples of statistical abuse, for all of which he promptly provides the necessary context to understand them. There was no better example of this than advertisements touting the anticarcinogenic effects of fruits and vegetables: “Throughout the 1990s, the news was filled with reports of miraculous anticarcinogenic effects from consuming nature’s bounty. The National Cancer Institute began pushing its 5 A Day program. Eat that many servings of fruits and vegetables and you would be a long way toward beating the odds against cancer” (Johnson 24). What these companies did not mention, however, was that these conclusions were reached based upon flawed experiments, known as voluntary retrospective studies, in which individuals with and without cancer were asked to report what they remembered of their diets. This undoubtedly could have led to what can be called circumstantial bias: that is, those without cancer would be more inclined to recall the healthy foods of their diet, whereas those with cancer could have been more likely to recount the negative aspects of their diet. And thus, we reach an abuse of statistics: a conclusion based off of hopelessly biased data, and one that clearly impacted American society for countless years thereafter.

           

            This is only reflective of half of the problem; what is also not known about fruits and vegetables is that the antioxidants that they possess, as well as fiber and certain types of vitamins, have anticarcinogenic effects only to a point. Only in moderation can these foods improve an individual’s chances of avoiding cancer; past that point, they actually worsen those very same odds. As if that was not enough, the changes in these odds often are made to sound far greater than they actually are: a 20 percent decrease in an individual’s chances of developing cancer sounds tremendous on paper, but when that twenty percent decrease is from a 1.50 percent chance to a 1.20 percent chance (fairly in line with actual decreases seen by many of these products), that decrease does not sound nearly as significant. This would be another abuse of statistics seen in the medical world.

            Statistical illiteracy, largely a byproduct of insufficient education, has therefore played a huge role in developing societal attitudes towards the sciences. Often times, science is used as the explanation to eye-popping statistics, but when the reality is exposed, the result is a distrust of the sciences. This reality is quite unfortunate, as both statistics and the sciences are given poor reputations in the media as a result. Statistical literacy and more specialized education would surely go a long ways towards solving these problems.

The Main Ideas

After reading my book, The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got There by Amanda Ripley, I concluded that the author had 3 main ideas that she wanted to convey.

1) There is a problem with education in America. The requirements for becoming a teacher are at very low standards compared to the top educated countries such as Poland, Finland, and Korea. For example, in some colleges, there is no need to major in math to attain a teacher’s degree. The reason for children in America have a lower math efficiency than the rest of the world because of their educators. The quality of education that children receive is automatically set to a low bar. Ripley states that acquiring a career in the teaching field in America is simple because it isn't competitive.

2) There isn't a common core standard throughout the U.S. Each state, or group of states have their own standards in education. This variation of standards causes a rift between the performances of students. Minnesota for example is competitively ranked with China and Korea in math. Whereas Oklahoma stands at almost last place in international performance for math. The variety of courses that are taught in each state directly correlates to the academic achievement of the children.

3) Education in America is relatively easier than other countries due to the curriculum standards and level of competition. The credentials and requirements for jobs are set at a lower bar than other countries. To put the difficulties of acquiring careers in the U.S and acquiring careers in other countries such as Poland into perspective, it is as difficult to get a teaching job in Poland as it is becoming a doctor in America.