How do other countries create "smarter" kids? What is it like to be a child in the world's new education superpowers? The Smartest Kids in the World "gets well beneath the glossy surfaces of these foreign cultures and manages to make our own culture look newly strange....The question is whether the startling perspective provided by this masterly book can also generate the will to make changes" (The New York Times Book Review).

In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they've never seen before. They are...