This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist for Time magazine and The Atlantic, an Emerson fellow with the New America Foundation and a graduate

of Cornell University. Her work has appeared in Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times of

London. In addition to her writing, she has appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and NPR.

She's spoken to the Pentagon, the United States Senate, the State Department, and the Department of

Homeland Security, as well as conferences on leadership public policy and education.

Her latest work is a New York Times bestseller entitled The Smartest Kids in the World

and how they got that way, published by Simon and Schuster.

Amanda Ripley, welcome to Thinking in Public.

Thanks so much for having me.

Now, where did this book come from? Just about everyone assumes there's a crisis in education,

but most people don't decide to write a book about it.

How did you make that decision?

You know, I kept hearing about these places, these countries we hear about on the news,

Finland and South Korea and how everyone is perfect and all the children are brilliant and I couldn't I couldn't quite see it you

know I couldn't visualize it didn't seem real so I wanted to know two things I

wanted to know what is it like to be a kid in these countries and how did these countries get so smart because they

were not always so smart not that long ago.

Now when we're talking about how smart the kids in these countries are maybe it'd be good

...