The Smartest Kids in the World (26 page)

When classes started, however, he had an uncomfortable sensation. Sitting in the Woolf seminar, he realized he wasn’t quite as prepared as he’d expected. Four out of ten Vassar students had attended private schools, including elite boarding schools in the Northeast. They seemed to have a fluency in analyzing literature that he didn’t possess. They made casual references to Greek mythology that Tom didn’t catch. One student described
Jacob’s Room
as starting
in media res,
as if everyone knew what that meant. They’d read Virgil, but he had not. It was unnerving.

At the same time, eight hundred miles away, Eric was experiencing the opposite sensation.

He’d moved to Chicago to attend DePaul University. He knew from his year in Korea that he felt most alive in the clamor of a big city, a place where he knew he could eat sushi at four in the morning—
whether or not he ever chose to. He was looking forward to studying politics and philosophy. But, that fall, when he sat down in the writing course required of all freshmen, he’d discovered something surprising. He was actually
over
prepared.

It was not like the Virginia Woolf seminar at Vassar. This class was taught by graduate students and designed to bring all students up to a baseline level of competence. Eric was bored. It was just like elementary school math class all over again, when he’d amused himself by answering addition problems in the shape of his initials.

Eric had already learned how to formulate a thesis and conduct basic research in his high school back in Minnesota; he’d assumed everyone else had learned those things, too. Sitting in the DePaul class, his notebook empty, he felt himself deflate, like a freshman balloon drifting back to earth.

In college, Eric and Tom were witnessing firsthand the same variation that defined schools across the United States and the world, the reason for this book. When the students edited each other’s work, Eric got to read his classmates’ writing. He discovered that many did not know how to structure an essay, develop an argument, or clearly communicate an idea. The writing was disjointed, and the grammar shabby. It wasn’t that these students were unwilling or unable to do better; it was that they’d never learned how.

Eric found other, smaller classes that he liked better. He explored Chicago. And he started thinking about transferring to a different college. It had worked in Korea, so maybe it would work in America, too.

In Tom’s case, he adapted easily; he read Virgil. He looked up
in media res
and discovered it was a Latin phrase that referred to starting a story in the middle of the plot. He caught up quickly, and by spring, he could toss off his own allusions to Greek mythology in his English classes. He figured out that a lot of the banter had been bullshit, but he’d needed to learn the vernacular. By the end of his freshman year, he was working on a paper with his classics professor about the Roman poet, Catullus.

But he had a glimpse of what might have been. If his mom and dad hadn’t taken him to Barnes & Noble as a regular Friday night ritual, if he hadn’t devoured literature on his own, he might not have gotten into the habit of reading deeply every day. Without that practice, he realized, he would have certainly been overwhelmed at Vassar. It wouldn’t have mattered that he’d taken AP English at Gettysburg High School; it wouldn’t have mattered that he’d gotten good grades. He needed more rigor than his schools had to offer. Luckily for him, he had found it on his own.

Like Kim, Jenny was still in high school back in America. They both had two more years until graduation. Jenny had bounced back and forth between Korea and the United States before, so she had some idea what to expect when her family moved to central New Jersey in the summer of 2011. She figured school would be much more humane than it was for her and Eric back at Namsan High School, and she was correct. Her classes were easier; her teachers and her classmates were more relaxed.

Still, there were surprises.

During the first Algebra II test that fall, the girl sitting next to her complained that she didn’t understand one of the problems. Jenny had answered it quickly, probably because she’d learned the material two years earlier. But the girl kept saying she needed help. Then something amazing happened: The teacher came over to help her! Right there in front of everyone he walked her through the solution—
during the test
.

Jenny watched, speechless. She wondered what would happen when that girl took the SAT without the teacher there to help. Later, a boy in her class did the same thing and, again, the teacher came over to help. Jenny rolled her eyes. She wished her Korean friends could see this; she looked forward to telling them the story on Skype when she got home.

Not everything was easier in American high school. That was
another surprise. That spring, Jenny discovered that kids at schools across America took something called the Presidential Fitness Test in gym class. It had been around for decades, and all that time, the standards had been impressively, almost inexplicably, high.

To meet the award benchmarks, Jenny and her classmates had to run an eight-minute mile and do forty-four sit-ups in sixty seconds. Bouncing off the floor between sit-ups was strictly prohibited; there were no short cuts in presidential fitness, unlike in algebra. The boys had to do thirteen pull-ups, and the girls had to do twenty-five push-ups. It didn’t count toward her gym grade, but a lot of the students, and the gym teacher, took it seriously, as if they were training for a real test.

Jenny couldn’t believe it. Twenty-five push-ups was not a joke. Why were the expectations so high? And why, given these expectations, did America have such an obesity problem?

Back in Korea, Jenny had taken a similar physical test in gym class, but the standards were lower. Instead of eight minutes to run a mile, kids were allotted nine-and-a-half minutes. And none of them cared about it anyway; they just walked around the track. They were worried about their math tests.

The irony was not lost on Jenny, who told her friends back home about the crazy intense American gym test. “For physical things, the standards are higher here. For studying, the standards are higher in Korea!”

Luckily, she felt confident she would pass the fitness test in New Jersey. She’d been training for it, after all, just like she used to train for math in Korea. She knew by then that meeting high expectations was mostly a matter of hard work.

When I got back to the States at the end of the school year, I spent a long time trying to make sense of what I’d seen. I was amazed by how many of our problems were universal. Everywhere I’d gone, teachers
had complained about tests, principals, and parents; parents, in turn, had agonized over their children’s education, relying on fear and emotion when they could not get facts. Politicians had lamented unions, and union leaders had lamented politicians.

Kids, meanwhile, were kids, as Jenny had told Eric on the bus that day in Busan, Korea. They had teachers they liked and teachers they didn’t. They played video games, texted in class, and watched television in every country I’d visited. What was different, more than anything else, was how seriously they took their education. That dedication fluctuated like an EKG line, depending on where children lived.

Why did they care?
Kim had asked the question in Finland, distilling this quest down to one sentence. After visiting her, I started to suspect that the answer was fairly straightforward: They took school more seriously because it
was
more serious. And it was more serious because everyone agreed it should be.

There was a consensus in Finland, Korea, and Poland that all children had to learn higher-order thinking in order to thrive in the world. In every case, that agreement had been born out of crisis: economic imperatives that had focused the national mind in a way that good intentions never would. That consensus about rigor had then changed everything else.

High school in Finland, Korea, and Poland had a purpose, just like high-school football practice in America. There was a big, important contest at the end, and the score counted. Their teachers were more serious, too: highly educated, well-trained, and carefully chosen. They had enough autonomy to do serious work; that meant they had a better chance of adapting and changing along with their students and the economy. The students had independence, too, which made school more bearable and cultivated more driven, self-sufficient high school graduates. The closer they got to adulthood, the more they got to act like adults.

In the United States and other countries, we’d put off this reckoning,
convinced that our kids would always get second and third chances until well into adulthood. We had the same attitude toward teachers: Anyone and everyone could become a teacher, as long as they showed up for class, followed the rules, and had good intentions. We had the schools we wanted, in a way. Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that their kids be assigned more challenging reading or that their kindergarteners learn math while they still loved numbers. They did show up to complain about bad grades, however. And they came in droves, with video cameras and lawn chairs and full hearts, to watch their children play sports.

That mindset had worked alright for most American kids, historically speaking. Most hadn’t needed a very rigorous education, and they hadn’t gotten it. Wealth had made rigor optional in America. But everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; they need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.

There were different ways to get to rigor, and not all of them were good. In Korea, the hamster wheel created as many problems as it solved. Joyless learning led mostly to good test scores, not to a resilient population. That kind of relentless studying could not be sustained, and there was evidence that Korean kids’ famous drive dropped off dramatically once they got to college.

Still, if I had to choose between the hamster wheel and the moon bounce that characterized many schools in the United States and other countries—a false choice, needless to say—I think I’d reluctantly choose the hamster wheel. It was relentless and excessive, yes, but it also felt more honest. Kids in hamster-wheel countries knew what it felt like to grapple with complex ideas and think outside their comfort zone; they understood the value of persistence. They knew what it felt like to fail, work harder, and do better. They were prepared for the modern world.

In the moon bounce, kids were being misled. Too much of the time, they being were fed a soft diet of pabulum by middling professionals.
If they failed, there were few obvious consequences. Only later, after high school, would they discover they’d been tricked. The real world did not always give second and third chances; the real world didn’t give credit just for showing up. When things were hard, your math teacher didn’t materialize to give you the answer.

Learning had become a currency, the kind that bought freedom. It wasn’t all that mattered in life, but it mattered more than ever. In that sense, countries like Finland—and Canada and New Zealand—had tapped into the ultimate natural resource. Their children were freer in some ways than kids in the hamster-wheel countries, because they’d gotten smarter without sacrificing the rest of their lives.

When it came to happiness,
Finland ranked second (after Denmark) in the 2012 World Happiness Report commissioned by the United Nations. The Finns had many reasons to be happy, including the fact that education increased income, and income increased happiness.
“If you want the American dream,” United Kingdom Labour Party leader Ed Miliband said at a social mobility conference in 2012, “go to Finland.” In the twenty-first century, it was easier for a poor person to get a great education in Finland than in almost any country in the world including the United States (number eleven in happiness).

When I thought about the future of education, I worried about kids like Kim, kids who had been underserved and underinspired by the system for years. I wondered what would happen to the stoner kids in Finland—and Oklahoma. I also felt more hopeful, though, than before I’d left. It was obvious that no country had figured this problem out; everyplace had problems, most of them fixable.

One thing was clear: To give our kids the kind of education they deserved, we had to first agree that rigor mattered most of all; that school existed to help kids learn to think, to work hard, and yes, to fail. That was the core consensus that made everything else possible.

I came back to a country humbled by recession and splintered by politics. Did this moment represent enough of a crisis for America? Would this be our Finland hour? Our Korean revelation? When we
would decide once and for all that a real education is a
hard
education for everyone, including teachers, rich kids, and poor kids? Top-down policy changes, from No Child Left Behind under President George W. Bush to Race to the Top under President Barack Obama, had tried to impose rigor on the U.S. system, to inject it forcibly into faltering schools and homes across the country. That could lift the floor but not the ceiling. People had to believe in rigor; they had to decide, maybe under duress, that it was time to get serious. They could be nudged into this revelation, but they had to experience it.

But would they?

When I returned, most Americans seemed to feel the urgency, the unsettling proximity of change and competition. That wasn’t enough, historically speaking. After all, most countries experiencing economic distress had not done what Korea, Finland, and Poland had. They had lacked the leadership or the luck to see that economic and social well-being depended on the combined intellectual health of regular citizens and that the
only
way to get smart was to work hard and learn well.

In 2014, Oklahoma was scheduled to roll out a set of more rigorous, coherent, and clear standards, called the Common Core. The standards, which had been adopted in forty-four other states, were designed to teach kids to think. They were shaped by international benchmarks as to what children should know. Yet this change, too, had come under attack by Oklahoma lawmakers.
“The Common Core State Standards are federalization of education and this violates local control,” Republican state representative Sally Kern told her fellow lawmakers, urging them to reject the standards.