Dani Mitchell

“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

“Exercising self-restraint in today's teen culture is downright un-American.”
― Leonard Sax, The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups

“You don't teach virtue by preaching virtue. You teach virtue by requiring virtuous behavior, so that virtuous behavior becomes a habit.”
― Leonard Sax, The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups

“Finland had required a matriculation test for 160 years; it was a way to motivate kids and teachers toward a clear, common goal, and it made a high school diploma mean something. Korea rerouted air traffic for their graduation test. Polish kids studied for their tests on nights and weekends, and they arrived for the exam wearing suits, ties, and dresses. In America, however, many people still believed in a different standard, one that explained a great deal about the country’s enduring mediocrity in education: According to this logic, students who passed the required classes and came to school the required number of days should receive their diplomas, regardless of what they had learned or what would happen to them when they tried to get a job at the Bama Companies. Those kids deserved a chance to fail later, not now. It was a perverse sort of compassion designed for a different century.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way