The Smartest Kids in the World (21 page)

The New Finland: Self-portrait by a student in Espoo, Finland.

One Friday during that long, dark winter, Kim’s host mother told her that she needed to get help. Something had happened to Kim around the time of her sixteenth birthday that February; she had started crying for no obvious reason, at school and at home. Kim wasn’t sure why. It had been one of the coldest winters in Finland’s history, and the sun was present for just six hours a day. Maybe that explained it. Or maybe it was the cold war with the twin five-year-olds who wanted their mother back. Maybe the twins had outlasted her in the end. All Kim knew for sure was that she felt drained, as if the light inside her had gone out.

She confided in her host mother that she sometimes felt hopeless. Susanne had talked to the exchange program people, and they had decided that Kim had to go to Helsinki to see a psychologist who could sort out whether she should go back to America early.

Kim didn’t argue. She took out her grandmother’s suitcase and quietly refilled it with all of her things. She packed up the gloves her
sister Kate had given her, and the Irish sweater from a friend of her aunt, all the things they had thought she would need to survive in Finland. Good intentions, she thought to herself.

She said goodbye to the little girls, surrendering the playroom to the victors at last. She carried everything with her, in case the trip ended in Oklahoma. She felt numb, as if this were happening to someone else. She withdrew into silence, that old familiar place.

As she sat on the high-speed train to Helsinki, flashing past the blue lakes and snow-covered pine trees, Kim closed her eyes. She saw the neatly wrapped Rice Krispies Treats she’d sold to raise money, the bunk beds at her new home in Finland, the children’s book her Finnish teacher had given her. She thought about the prospect of leaving Finland several months early, having failed at the only impressive thing she had ever done.

Kim had been warned that this might happen in mass emails from AFS, her exchange program. Teenagers living abroad tended to go through predictable phases, and the one that came in the middle of the year was a dark one. Many felt depressed and isolated. The initial buzz had worn off; the holidays had arrived; and the lark had turned into an occupation, the kind that would end one day but not soon. Still, Kim hadn’t thought that this malaise would befall her, not after all she’d done to get here.

Looking out the window on the train, Kim saw her reflection.
She felt like two people. One part of her felt resigned to defeat, ready to prove everyone right. Maybe she should have gone to Italy after all, somewhere warm and bright, or maybe she should have stayed right where she was in Oklahoma, just as her mom had said.

There was another part of her, too. That part of her was just waking up, beginning to stir after a long silence. This was the girl who had written to sixty businesses in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, asking them to sponsor her trip to Finland. When no one had responded, she’d sold beef jerky door to door instead. That part of her was still there, somewhere. In her mind, she imagined that girl lacing up her combat
boots. She pictured her swiping black grease under her eyes. That girl had no intention of going back to Oklahoma early.

In Helsinki, Kim saw the psychologist. They talked about her reasons for coming to Finland, her parents’ divorce, and her adjustment to living abroad. The psychologist ruled out serious depression, and they agreed to meet again.

Between sessions, Kim roamed through Helsinki, visiting museums, riding buses, and watching all the people. After sixteen years in rural Oklahoma and six months in rural Finland, it felt exhilarating to see so many humans in one place. Standing by the harbor one afternoon, Kim was struck by how many children she saw. School had ended for the day, but to see them walking casually all by themselves through the streets of Helsinki was disorienting. There was a boy, not more than ten, sitting on a bench; over there were two girls, playing near a fountain. She’d seen kids on their own in Pietarsaari; even small children walked to school on their own. She hadn’t, however, expected to see such a thing in Finland’s largest city. She felt jealous of them in a strange way. What would it have been like, she wondered, to grow up with that kind of freedom?

After two weeks, the psychologist told Kim she could stay in Finland. She had been given a second chance. Kim felt a weight lift. It was like getting her passport all over again. AFS found an older couple with a big house in Pietarsaari to host Kim for the rest of the year. She could return to the same town, and she’d have a room of her own.

This time, Kim knew, she needed to speak up. She should have told Susanne that she adored her but she needed a host family with enough mental and physical space for her. She hadn’t wanted to offend anyone, so she’d been silent for too long.

There was a word in Finnish,
sisu
[pronounced SEE-su]. It meant strength in the face of great odds, but more than that, a sort of inner fire. Kim first learned about
sisu
when she was researching Finland from Oklahoma. “It is
a compound of bravado and bravery, of ferocity and tenacity,”
Time
magazine wrote in a story about Finland in 1940, “of
the ability to keep fighting after most people would have quit, and to fight with the will to win.”

It may have been the one word that encapsulated the Finnish way more than any other.
Sisu
was what it took to coax potatoes out of the soil of the Arctic Circle;
sisu
had helped Finland pull itself back from the brink of irrelevance to become an education superpower.
Sisu
helped explain how a country smaller than Montana had invented Nokia, Marimekko, and the Linux operating system, not to mention the video game
Angry Birds
.
Sisu
was Finland’s version of drive, a quiet force that never quit. English has no word for
sisu
, though the closest synonym might be
grit.

That day, arriving at the station near Pietarsaari, Kim felt as if she understood what
sisu
was. She didn’t know how long the feeling would last, but she hoped she would remember it. As she heaved her suitcase off the train and made her way outside with the rest of the passengers, she felt almost as if she belonged.

I met Kim and both of her host families for dinner in Pietarsaari one night that spring. By then, the snow had finally melted. We gathered at a big, white clapboard restaurant on the sea. Kim had stayed in close touch with Susanne despite having moved out. She wrote a regular column for Susanne’s newspaper, and Susanne was working on a Finnish magazine story about Kim.

We ate cod and cloudberries, and Kim sat in the middle, wearing a red jacket and telling stories about her first days in Finland. She seemed more sure of herself than she had just a few months before. That’s when she told me she was working on a plan for her return to America.

“I’m applying to virtual high school,” she said.

Kim had decided she couldn’t go back to Sallisaw High School. She didn’t want to be the person she was before, and she was afraid she couldn’t change if everything else stayed the same.

“I worry that the indifference will start to affect me again. That I’ll just slip back into the views of all my peers.”

“What view is that?”

“That ‘it just doesn’t matter; that school sucks, so why should we be here?’ I feel like removing myself from that situation.”

She’d researched boarding schools on the Internet, just like she’d once researched Finland. That was the fantasy. Then she’d come across a link for something called Oklahoma Virtual High School. She’d discovered it was a real high school, albeit one that existed online. And it was free, unlike boarding school. She and her mother were going to talk about it some more, but Kim seemed confident she’d found a way to get through her last years of American high school.

Afterward, we emerged into the blue twilight. It was ten o’clock and still light out, the time of year when the Nordic countries paid their debts from the winter. Kim let me take a few pictures of her in front of the sea, then she got on her bike and rode home, like a real Finn.

Two days later, I accompanied Kim to school. I went to classes with her, and she introduced me to her principal and her teachers. It happened to be the week that the seniors got the results of
the big matriculation exam they’d taken earlier that year—the one that determined where they would likely go to college. Kim’s Finnish teacher, Tiina Stara, was worried about her students. “They are feeling a lot of pressure. It’s not like in Japan or Korea, but still.”

The test had been around for more than 160 years and was deeply embedded in the system. The countries with the best education outcomes all had these tests at the end of high school. It was one of the most obvious differences between them and the United States—which had a surplus of tests, few of which had meaningful effects on kids’ lives.

Matriculation exams like Finland’s helped inject drive into education systems—creating a bright finish line for kids and schools to
work toward. Teenagers from countries with these kinds of tests
performed over sixteen points higher on PISA than those in countries without them.

Still, Stara worried that this test stressed out her students and drove too much of her lesson planning. “I sometimes want so badly to do something fun with them,” she said, clenching her fist in her lap. “I think it’s very important that they enjoy studying.” In addition to the matriculation exam, Finnish kids still took regular classroom tests and final exams every six weeks at the end of each mini-semester. In surveys,
Finnish kids cited the high number of tests as one reason that they didn’t like school. Tests were controversial all over the world, another universal truth.

Stara hastened to add that she would not do away with the matriculation test if she could. “It’s a very good exam,” she said, nodding her head.

Then she described what rigor looked like: Finland’s exam stretched out over three grueling weeks and lasted about
fifty hours
. Teachers followed students to the bathroom to make sure they didn’t cheat. The Finnish section took two days. On the first day, students read several texts and wrote short essays analyzing each one, over the course of six hours. On the second day, students chose one topic out of fourteen options and wrote a single, very long essay, over the course of another six hours. One recent topic was, “Why is it difficult to achieve peace in the Middle East?” Another was, “I blog, therefore I am.”

To do well, students had to be able to structure a long-form essay, communicate complex ideas, and, of course, use proper spelling and grammar. Stara felt a heavy responsibility to help her students do well on this test.

It was hard to think of a test like this in the United States. The SAT and ACT served a similar purpose, but neither was as comprehensive or as embedded in schools themselves.
Many states had some kind of graduation test,
but kids didn’t need much
sisu
to pass them. The
New York State Regents exam was considered one of the most
challenging. Yet the English portion lasted only a quarter as long as the Finnish portion of Finland’s test. It included just one essay and two short responses, each of which only had to be one paragraph long.

The English test used to be six hours, but the New York Board of Regents voted to cut it in half in 2009, citing the logistical challenges of administering a long test, particularly with other distractions, like snow days, a rationale that would have amused the Finns. Altogether, the Regents exam required
one-third the time of Finland’s test.

In Finland, school was hard, and tests affected students’ lives. Snow was not a good excuse. That might explain why
only 20 percent of Finnish teenagers said they looked forward to math lessons, compared to 40 percent of Americans. They had to work hard, and expectations were high.
About half of Finnish kids said they got good grades in math, compared to almost three-quarters of Americans. (In fact, American fifteen-year-olds were more likely than kids in thirty-seven other countries to say they got good math grades.) The problem with rigorous education was that it was
hard
. Ideally, it was fun, too, but it couldn’t always be, not even in Finland.

There was much to be said for American teachers, who, in many schools, worked hard to entertain and engage their students with interactive classrooms. In my survey of 202 exchange students, I was struck by how many of them brought up their affection for their U.S. teachers. One German exchange student surveyed described the difference this way:

“The teachers in the U.S. are way more friendly. They are like your friends. . . . In Germany, we know nothing about our teachers. They are just teachers. We would never talk to them about personal problems.”

This bond between teachers and students mattered, and U.S. teachers deserved credit for connecting with their students. But learning to do higher-order thinking, reading, and math mattered, too. Finland seemed to have found a way to create manageable pressure, something compassionate
teachers worried about, but not something that forced millions of kids to study for fifteen to eighteen hours per day. The Finns had gone long on teaching quality, autonomy, and equity, which meant they could ease up a bit on drive. In Finland, kids could have a life
and
an education, too.

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I appreciated the rare balance it had struck. Finland had achieved rigor without ruin. It was impossible not to notice something else, too: During my time in Pietarsaari, I saw exactly one black person. In Kim’s classes, everyone looked basically the same. Nationwide,
only 3 percent of Finland’s students had immigrant parents (compared to 20 percent of teenagers in the United States).

In fact, Finland, Korea and Poland were
all
homogeneous places with few immigrants or racial minorities. Japan and Shanghai, China, two other education superpowers, were similarly bland. Maybe homogeneity was a prerequisite for rigor at scale. Did sameness beget harmony, which somehow boosted learning? If so, was Finland irrelevant to a big, jangling place like the United States?