Ripley followed an American high school exchange student, Kim, who spent a year in Finland. At one point, Kim asked the Finnish students a question that had been on her mind: “Why do you guys care so much [about your education]?” The students in Finland were baffled by the question, “as if Kim had just asked them why they insisted on breathing so much. . . . Maybe the real mystery was not why Finnish kids cared so much, but why so many of her [American] classmates did not.”18
