The idea for this book was born two years ago, when I read Amanda Ripley’s volume The Smartest Kids in the World. I hate to be promiscuous with compliments, but it’s a very adequate effort. Its title, however, is highly misleading, which I realizedas soon as I checked the book’s index and didn’t see any of my granddaughters mentioned. That’s like Romeo and Juliet without Juliet. The Old Testament without Moses. Black Swan without swans.
So I decided then and there to write a book that’s actually about the smartest kids in the world—and how countries around the globe educate them.
Regular Fordham followers know that we’re not fans of how America’s schools treat gifted students; benign neglect is usually the best they can hope for, like Mary and Kitty Bennet, Jan Brady, and the members of Coldplay not named Chris Martin.
So how do other nations do it? Especially those whose high-achieving kids are knocking the socks off ours? We began with a hypothesis: that the strongest nations would practice what we call the Quarantine Strategy. At the earliest possible moment—never later than preschool—identify children with outstanding academic potential and cordon them off from all exposure to their dim-witted peers, as well as any influence from pop music, competitive athletics, or vaccines. This is what my parents did for me, and it worked like a charm.