"What The Smartest Kids in the World suggests is that not everyone is smart in the same way, and that America might benefit if it stopped trying to shoehorn all its children into the same dubious mold." - John Anderson, Wall Street Journal
Education • High School • Coming of Age • Youth Perspectives • Exchange Programs • U.S Perspective Abroad
Date of Completion: 2021 | Run Time: 97 minutes | Language: English | Captions: Yes | Includes: Transcript | Producer & Director: Tracy Droz Tragos | Producer: Shannon E. Riggs
In many ways, THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD is a classic coming-of-age, road-trip film – wide eyed U.S. high school kids, recognizably American in their bravado, setting out to discover the world. What each of them knows at the beginning of their journey as a foreign exchange student is that something is missing in their public high school in the United States. They are not getting what they need and want. They are in various ways stuck, or bored, or unchallenged, and they long for something more. The film acknowledges that the students’ teachers are also not getting what they need and want, and that the students’ parents feel frustrated and powerless in the face of the system. Much has been written about the challenges and failures of education in America. But this film is not about parents or teachers or educational theory; it is about students. Our students. Our children. What do they think about their education? What is their experience and their insight? What do we have to learn by listening to them? Every walk to school, evening study session, and classroom moment is from the students’ point-of-view. By going with them as they experience high school outside the U.S., we see their openness to adventure and possibility, their discovery, and their wisdom. Over the course of a year, each of them discovers, in differing ways, that schools outside the United States are simply harder; students elsewhere are asked to do more and they do it. In South Korea, students revere education. There is a camaraderie and a sense of peer support. Students collect everyone’s cell phone at the beginning of each day, they clean their own classrooms, and they cheer each other on at the big test at the end of the year. In European countries, students have more autonomy and free time than in the United States. They have a degree of responsibility for their own education and they achieve remarkable results. Based on Amanda Ripley’s important book, this film tells the personal stories of four American exchange students whose world-view shifted as they experienced new cultures and classrooms, and how their journeys impacted their expectations of themselves and their futures.
"What The Smartest Kids in the World suggests is that not everyone is smart in the same way, and that America might benefit if it stopped trying to shoehorn all its children into the same dubious mold."