The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley Page A

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 hadtricked-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 ofthe 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 thatonly 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 thoughtFinland was a far better model than his own country. After all, Finland spent less per pupil on education, andjust 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.
claustrophobic in korea
    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