Amanda Ripley's The Smartest Kids In The World

Introduction

In one the New York Times Bestseller book, The Smartest Kids in the World, after a comprehensive analysis of the world’s top education system, Amanda Ripley clearly describes the differences between the Finland’s “Utopia” model, a system built on trust in kids, highly trained and autonomous teacher, and effective school management, and South Korea’s “pressure Cooker” model, a system that demands hard works from the kids in an ultra-competitive environment which usually worned out the students. She then explain how both country score very high in the PISA, although they have different approaches. After carefully reviewing both countries’ approaches, I found the Utopia model of Finland is very intriguing and Malaysian education system is also moving slowly toward the Utopia model through the implementation of Pentaksiran Berasaskan Sekolah (PBS)

Pentaksiran Berasaskan Sekolah
Not only that, the component of PBS also divided into two areas: academic and non-academic. These ( ) shows that the Malaysian education system no longer just an exam-oriented education, but to adopt a more comprehensive education model. Besides that, the recognition and autonomy given to the teachers to come out with their own formative and summative assessment in school is also a huge deal. This give the teachers more freedom to tailor their teaching method coherent to the student capabilities, and making the students’ learning process more