The Smartest Kids in the World (9 page)

Without this education obsession, South Korea could not have become the economic powerhouse that it was in 2011. (Since 1962, the nation’s GDP had risen
about 40,000 percent, making it the world’s thirteenth largest economy.)
Education acted like an antipoverty vaccine in Korea, rendering family background less and less relevant to kids’ life chances over time.

But there weren’t enough of those university slots or coveted jobs, so the lottery morphed into a kind of Iron Child competition that parents and kids resented, even as they perpetuated it. It was an extreme meritocracy for children that hardened into a caste system for adults. Even when more universities opened, the public continued to fixate on the top three. There was a warning for the rest of the world. Competition had become an end unto itself, not the learning it was supposed to motivate.

The country had created a monster, Lee told me. The system had become overly competitive, leading to an unhealthy preoccupation with test scores and a dependence on private tutoring academies. Even over summer break, libraries got so crowded that kids had to get tickets to get a space. Many paid $4 to rent a small air-conditioned carrel in the city’s plentiful supply of for-profit self-study libraries.

Korea’s sky-high PISA scores were mostly a function of students’ tireless efforts, Lee believed, not the country’s schools. Kids and their families drove the results. Motivation explained Korea’s PISA scores more than curriculum, in other words.

Per student, Korean taxpayers spent half as much money as American taxpayers on schools, but Korean families made up much of the difference out of their own pockets. In addition to hagwon fees, they had to pay for public school, since the government subsidy didn’t cover all the expenses. Eric’s school was not the most elite public school in Busan, but it still cost about fifteen hundred dollars per year.

On paper, Eric’s high schools in Minnesota and Korea had some
things in common. Both Minnetonka and Namsan boasted
dropout rates of less than 1 percent, and both schools paid their teachers similarly
high salaries. However, while Minnetonka kids performed in musicals, Namsan kids studied and studied some more. The problem was not that Korean kids weren’t learning enough or working hard enough; it was that they weren’t working smart.

The Iron Child culture was contagious; it was hard for kids and parents to resist the pressure to study more and more. But all the while, they complained that the fixation on rankings and test scores was crushing their spirit, depriving them not just of sleep but of sanity.

One Sunday morning during that school year, a teenager named Ji
stabbed his mother in the neck in their home in Seoul. He did it to stop her from going to a parent-teacher conference. He was terrified that she’d find out that he’d lied about his latest test scores.

Afterwards, Ji kept his secret for eight months. Each day, he came and went to school and back again as if nothing had changed. He told neighbors his mother had left town. To contain the odor of her decomposing body, he sealed the door to her room with glue and tape. He invited friends over for ramen. Finally, his estranged father discovered the corpse, and Ji was arrested for murder.

This ghastly story captivated the country, as might be expected, but for specific and revealing reasons. Ji’s crime was not, in the minds of many Koreans, an isolated tragedy; it was a reflection of a study-crazed culture that was driving children mad.

According to his test scores, Ji ranked in the top 1 percent of all high school students in the country, but, in absolute terms, he still placed four thousandth nationwide. His mother had insisted he must be number one at all costs, Ji said. When his scores had disappointed her in the past, he said, she’d beaten him and withheld food.

In response to the story, many Koreans sympathized more with
the living son than the dead mother. Commentators projected their own sour memories of high school onto Ji’s crime.
Some went so far as to accuse the mother of inviting her own murder. A
Korea Times
editorial described the victim as
“one of the pushy ‘tiger’ mothers who are never satisfied with their children’s school records no matter how high their scores.”

As for Ji, he confessed to police immediately, weeping as he described how his mother had haunted his dreams after he’d killed her. At the trial, the prosecutor asked for a fifteen-year prison sentence. The judge, citing mitigating circumstances, sentenced the boy to three and a half years.

Meanwhile, Korean politicians vowed anew to treat the country’s education fever, as it was called. Under Lee’s tenure, the ministry had hired and trained 500 admissions officers to help the country’s universities select applicants the way U.S. universities did, which is to say, based on something other than just test scores.

Almost overnight, however, new hagwons cropped up to help students navigate the new alternative admissions scheme.
Hundreds of students were accused of lying about their hometowns to get preferential spots reserved for underprivileged rural families. One parent fabricated a divorce to take advantage of a preference for single-parent children. The fever raged on.

The country’s leaders worried that unless the rigid hierarchy started to nurture more innovation, economic growth would stall and fertility rates would continue to decline as families felt the pressure of paying for all that tutoring.

To retroactively improve public schools, so that parents would feel less need for hagwons, Lee tried to improve teaching. Korea already had
highly educated elementary school teachers, relative to the United States and most countries. Korean elementary teachers came from just a dozen universities that admitted
the top 5 percent of applicants, and they were well trained. Middle school teachers-in-training in Korea performed at the
top of the world on a mathematics test
administered in six countries, trouncing future teachers in the United States.

Korea’s high-school teachers were not as impressive, however. During a shortage of teachers decades earlier, the government had made a
fateful mistake, allowing too many colleges to train secondary teachers. Those 350 colleges had lower standards than the elementary training programs. Like the more than 1,000 teacher-training colleges in the United States, the Korean programs churned out far more teachers-to-be than the country needed. Teacher preparation was a lucrative industry for colleges, but the lower standards made the profession less prestigious and less effective. Because, as one Korean policymaker famously said, “The
quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”

To elevate the profession, Lee rolled out a new teacher evaluation scheme to give teachers useful feedback and hold them accountable for results. Under the new system, teachers were evaluated in part by their own students and their parents, who filled out online surveys, as well as other teachers, an approach meant to approximate the 360-degree review used in many businesses. (Unlike the model used by many U.S. districts, Korea’s teacher evaluation scheme did not include student test-score growth; officials I talked to seemed to want to use this data, but they didn’t know how to assign accountability, since so many students had multiple teachers, including outside tutors, instructing them in the same subjects.)

Under Korea’s new rules, low-scoring teachers were supposed to be retrained. But, as in U.S. districts where reformers have tried imposing similar strategies, teachers and their unions fought back, calling the evaluations degrading and unfair. Pretty policies on paper turned toxic in practice. As a form of protest, some Korean teachers gave all their peers the highest possible reviews. In 2011,
less than 1 percent of Korea’s teachers were actually sent for retraining, and
some simply refused to go.

After his first year in office, one of Lee’s biggest accomplishments
was that spending on hagwons had declined. The figures went
down just 3.5 percent, but he considered it a major victory nonetheless.

Listening to Lee, I realized that the rest of the world could learn as much from what worked in Korea as from what didn’t work. First, countries could change. That was hopeful. Korea had raised its expectations for what kids could do despite epidemic poverty and illiteracy. Korea did not wait to fix poverty before radically improving its education system, including its teacher colleges. This faith in education and people had catapulted Korea into the developed world.

Second, rigor mattered. Koreans understood that mastering difficult academic content was important. They didn’t take shortcuts, especially in math. They assumed that performance was mostly a product of hard work—not God-given talent. This attitude meant that all kids tried harder, and it was more valuable to a country than gold or oil.

As Eric had noticed on his first day, Korean schools existed for one and only one purpose: so that children could master complex academic material. It was an obvious difference. U.S. schools, by contrast, were about many things, only one of which was learning. This lack of focus made it easy to lose sight of what mattered most.

For example, U.S. schools spend a relatively large sum of money on sports and technology, instead of, say, teachers’ salaries. When I surveyed 202 exchange students from fifteen countries, they overwhelmingly agreed that they saw more technology in U.S. schools. Even students from high-performing countries said they saw more technology in their U.S. classrooms than back home. Seven out of ten American teenagers who had been abroad agreed. Americans had
tricked-out classrooms with interactive white boards, high-tech projectors, and towers of iPads. However, there was little evidence that these purchases had paid off for anyone other than the technology vendors themselves.

Third, and this was Lee’s most immediate problem: In places with extreme levels of student drive, winning the competition could become the goal in and of itself. Families and kids could lose sight of
the purpose of learning and fixate obsessively on rankings and scores. In some high-income American neighborhoods, kids experienced a version of this compulsion, working day and night to get into an Ivy League college and prove themselves perfect on paper, perhaps only later wondering why. This obsession remained relatively mild in the United States, as shown by the persistently low math performance of even the wealthiest U.S. kids and the fact that
only 15 percent of teenagers took afterschool lessons in the United States (a rate below average for the developed world). However, a small number of kids (many of them Asian-American) lived their own Westernized version of the Iron Child competition.

Finally, it was clear that the real innovation in Korea was not happening in the government or the public schools. It was happening in Korea’s shadow education system—the multimillion-dollar afterschool tutoring complex that Lee was trying to undermine. I realized that, if I wanted to see what a truly free-market education system looked like, I would have to stay up late.

Personally, Lee thought
Finland was a far better model than his own country. After all, Finland spent less per pupil on education, and
just one in ten kids took afterschool lessons. In Korea, seven in ten took extracurricular lessons. Both countries scored at the top of the world on PISA, but, however you looked at it, Finnish children got a far better deal. There was more than one way to become a superpower, Lee warned; take care to choose the high road.

After visiting the minister in Seoul, I took a high-speed train to Busan, the booming beachfront city on the southern coast of Korea. Eric offered to give me a tour. He showed up at the lobby of my hotel in his white-rimmed sunglasses and a messenger bag, eager to please.

“Do you feel like Korean food or are you already sick of it? Have you had Korean pizza? It’s crazy! Or we could do sushi.”

Eric loved Korea. As we walked through the clamor of the shopping stalls, he pointed out socks with Barack Obama’s face on them and made me try his favorite yogurt drink. We made a special stop at a gift store so he could show me the infamous napping pillows—demonstrating how they slipped over the wrist for effortless comfort.

“I adapt really well to places,” he told me. He had diligently worked on his Korean and could now navigate gracefully through restaurants and casual conversations. He ordered sweet-potato pizza for both of us. By this time, he’d spent a night at a Buddhist temple high in the mountains; he’d learned Taekwondo; on one harrowing evening at a fish market, he’d even forced himself to eat a live baby octopus, wrapped around his chopstick.

Eric appreciated the weirdness of Korea and the warmth of Koreans. Really, the only problem was school. He had tried to keep his mind open, but he dreaded those days at Namsan, sitting for six hours with students too stressed—or exhausted—to talk for more than five minutes between classes, then taking the bus home alone.

It wasn’t that Eric couldn’t be alone. In fact, he had a lot of experience with isolation. He’d spent years as a closeted gay teenager in America. He knew about loneliness.

But he had discovered that the pressure to conform extended well beyond sexuality in Korea. Teenagers were in all kinds of closets, sometimes literally, locked into small, airless spaces, studying for the test. “The students I’ve talked to despise the system,” he said, shaking his head. “They absolutely loathe it.”

Eric admired one part of the Korean system—the high expectations that everyone had for what kids could do. He was curious about the hagwons, where his classmates said they learned so much. However, he was learning that the top of the world could be a lonely place, and the important question was not just which kids lived there, but what they had gone through to get there.