The Smartest Kids in the World Read online

  A few minutes later, he glanced backwards at the rows of students behind him. Then he looked again, eyes wide. A third of the class was asleep. Not nodding off, but flat-out, no-apology sleeping, with their heads down on the desks. One girl actually had her head on a special pillow that slipped over her forearm. This was pre-meditated napping.

  How could this be? Eric had read all about the hard-working Koreans who trounced the Americans in math, reading, and science. He hadn’t read anything about shamelessly sleeping through class. As if to compensate for his classmates, he sat up even straighter and waited to see what happened next.

  The teacher lectured on, unfazed.

  At the end of class, the kids woke up. They had a ten-minute break and made every second count. Girls sat on top of their desks or on overturned trash cans, chatting with each other and texting on their phones. A few of the boys started drumming on their desks with their pencils. They were strangely comfortable in the classroom, as if they were in their own living rooms at home.

  Next was science class. Once again, at least a third of the class went to sleep. It was almost farcical. How did Korean kids get those record-setting test scores if they spent so much of their time asleep in class?

  Soon he discovered the purpose of the teacher’s backscratcher. It was the Korean version of wake-up call. Certain teachers would lightly tap kids on the head when they fell asleep or talked in class. The kids called it a “love stick.”

  At lunch, Eric followed the other students to the cafeteria and copied everything they did, filling up his tray with kimchi, a kind of spicy, fermented cabbage that appeared at every meal in Korea, along with transparent noodles and what looked like vegetable and beef stew. He was relieved to see the Canadian and sat down with her to eat. It was a treat to have a real, freshly cooked meal, not the warmed-up, pre-fab entrees he got at Minnetonka.

  For a moment, sitting there in the warm cafeteria twirling noodles with chop sticks, Eric felt as though he’d made the right decision in coming to Korea. The kids he’d graduated with were all starting college now. They’d bought their extralong twin sheets at Bed Bath & Beyond and met their roommates; they were going to freshman writing seminars and fraternity parties. Eric had deliberately chosen to step off the treadmill. He’d spent thirteen years in school and been politely bored much of the time. Like a lot of kids all over the world, he’d spent a lot of time staring at clocks, doodling in margins, and wondering whether this was all there was.

  For the last two years of high school, the International Baccalaureate program had challenged him in a way nothing else had. And it had reminded him how it felt to really learn—to think and discover things for the sake of discovery, not because it was what he was supposed to do.

  So, after he’d gotten accepted into DePaul University in Chicago, he’d checked the box to defer. He’d wanted to live in Asia—to discover a totally different world in which he understood nothing at all whatsoever—and marinate in the strangeness for a while. Then, he could come back and decorate a dorm room and let his life after high school begin.

  The Korean kids bolted down their food and then raced outside to claim the small amount of free time they had left. Some of the boys played soccer in the dirt, and a few of the girls sat on the steps and, hunched over their smart phones, logged on to CyWorld, which was like Facebook with more privacy controls. Eric was one of the last students to finish his food and leave the cafeteria.

  Between classes, Eric asked one of the other students about this test he kept hearing about—the one Korean high school seniors took before they graduated. “It’s like your SAT in America,” the boy told Eric. Except that your score determined the rest of your life.

  “In Korea, your education can be reduced to a number,” the boy explained. “If your number is good, you have a good future.”

  The highest score guaranteed acceptance into one of Korea’s three most prestigious universities and, with that, you were destined for a good job, a nice house, and a lifetime of ease. Everyone would respect you. You were chosen by God, as another student put it, only half joking.

  But there was a problem: only 2 percent of seniors got into these top three schools. So, the exam was a chokepoint for the ambitions of millions of kids and their parents. Eric’s classmates talked about this test with dread. They would spend the next two years of their lives studying, planning, and praying to do well on this test. Not one of them looked forward to it.

  Minnesota had a graduation test of its own. Eric had taken the math portion his junior year, but it was so easy that he couldn’t imagine failing it. Kids who scored below the cutoff were automatically enrolled in a special class and allowed to retake the test again and again until they passed. The Korean test, by contrast, was offered one day each year, and it was designed to be very difficult. Students who did poorly could take it again, but they had to wait a year.

  In Eric’s next class, the teacher wrote each student’s test score on the chalkboard, using ID numbers, not names. But all the kids knew each other’s numbers. It was the first of many times that Eric would see his classmates publicly ranked. One girl put her head in her hands, and another just shook her head.

  Most of the tests at the school were graded on a curve, so only 4 percent of kids could get the top score, regardless of how hard they worked. On and on went the hierarchy, all the way to the ninth and worst possible score, which the bottom 4 percent of the class earned, every time.

  Everyone in Eric’s class knew everyone else’s ranking, not just on this test but on everything. The top twenty-eight kids in the grade were the class heroes, and also the martyrs. Because they had the most to lose, they worked hardest of all.

  At ten past two, Eric left school early. Since he was an exchange student, he was exempt from having to experience the full force of the Korean school day. He asked one of his classmates what would happen after he left.

  “We keep going to school.”

  Eric looked at him blankly.

  “Until when?”

  “Classes end at ten after four,” he said.

  Then he went on: After classes, the kids cleaned the school, mopping the floors, wiping the chalkboards, and emptying the garbage. The kids who had received demerits—for misbehaving or letting their hair grow too long—had to wear red pinnies and clean the bathrooms. Work, including the unpleasant kind, was at the center of Korean school culture, and no one was exempt.

  At four thirty, everyone settled back in their seats for test-prep classes, in anticipation of the college entrance exam. Then they ate dinner in the school cafeteria.

  After dinner came yaja, a two hour period of study loosely supervised by teachers. Most kids reviewed their notes from the day or watched online test-prep lectures, as the teachers roamed the hallways and confiscated the occasional illicit iPod.

  Around nine in the evening, Eric’s classmates finally left Namsan.

  But the school day still wasn’t over. At that point, most kids went to private tutoring academies known as hagwons. That’s where they did most of their real learning, the boy said. They took more classes there until eleven, the city’s hagwon curfew. Then—finally—they went home to sleep for a few hours before reporting back to school at eight the next morning.

  Eric listened to this epic regimen with a mounting feeling of dread. How could teenagers do nothing—literally nothing—but study? Suddenly, he understood what he had seen in class that day. The kids had acted like they lived in the classroom because they essentially did. They spent more than twelve hours there every weekday—and they already went to school almost two months longer than kids back in Minnesota. His classmates slept in their classes for one primal reason: because they were exhausted.

  Suddenly, Eric wanted very badly to leave early.

  By quarter past two, he and the Canadian girl were walking across the dirt field, headed away from Namsan—seven hours before their classmates could leave. While the Korean kids worked, the exchange students went into
a convenience store. Eric noticed an ice cream bar made with red-bean paste, molded into the shape of a fish. He bought it, hoping it wouldn’t taste like fish. It didn’t! It tasted like vanilla. Around two-thirty, he caught the bus back home. The Korean kids kept working.

  Lying on his bed back at his host family’s apartment, Eric thought more about what the boy had told him. Korean kids essentially went to school twice—every weekday. He had found one possible explanation for Korea’s PISA scores, and it was depressing. Kids learned a lot, but they spent a ridiculous amount of time doing so. They had math classes at school—and math classes in hagwons. He was astounded by the inefficiency of it all. In Korea, school never stopped.

  Staring out the window at the city, he recalibrated. Before he’d left the United States, he had thought that American schools did too much standardized testing and put too much pressure on kids and teachers. Everyone always seemed to be complaining about tests and over-programmed kids. Now, thinking back on the rhetoric about high-stakes testing and stressed-out kids, Eric almost laughed.

  American tests were not high stakes for students. In fact, the stakes couldn’t have been much lower, especially for standardized tests. The consequences, if there were any, extended mostly to the adults who worked at the school; their school might, for example, be labeled in need of improvement by the federal government and, in a few places, a small fraction of teachers with extremely low scores might eventually lose their jobs. But for most kids, standardized tests were frequent, unsophisticated, and utterly irrelevant to their lives.

  Even regular classroom tests did not mean as much in the United States as they did in Korea. If kids did poorly in the United States, there was always a caveat: The test was unfair. Or, That’s okay! Not everyone can be good at math. In Korea, the lesson was cleaner: You didn’t work hard enough, and you had to work harder next time.

  He started to realize that pressure was a relative term, and so was testing. From what Eric had seen so far, Namsan seemed designed to convey, through austere classrooms and brutal hierarchies, one message: that kids’ futures depended not on their batting averages, their self-esteem, or their Facebook status, but on how hard they worked to master rigorous academic material.

  Was this what it took, he wondered, to score at the top of the world on international tests? If so, Eric wasn’t sure he’d want to be number one.

  iron child competition

  I met Korea’s education minister, Lee Ju-Ho, at his office in Seoul. He had a boyish cowlick and a default expression of mild amusement, both of which artfully masked the ambition that had powered his career up to this point.

  Lee was a product of the Korean pressure cooker. He had attended an elite high school and Seoul National University, one of the country’s top three universities. Then he’d earned his PhD in economics at Cornell. He’d risen swiftly up the Korean hierarchy, becoming a professor, then a politician. But when he became the Minister of Education, he did so with the goal of dismantling the pressure cooker, piece by piece.

  We drank tea around a large table with his entourage of advisers, none of whom spoke. When I asked if he agreed with President Obama’s glowing rhetoric about the Korean education system, he smiled a tired smile. It’s a question he got asked often, usually by Korean reporters who could not understand what the U.S. president—or anyone—would find to like about Korea’s system.

  “You Americans see a bright side of the Korean education system,” he said. “But Koreans are not happy with it.”

  In some ways, Korea was an extreme manifestation of a very old Asian tradition. Chinese families had been hiring test-prep tutors since the seventh century. Civil-service exams dated back before the printing press. In tenth-century Korea, ambitious young men had to pass an exam to get a government job. The high-stakes test was, in practice, accessible only to the sons of the elite, who could afford the ancient version of test prep.

  Despite the American stereotype that Asians excelled in math and science, regular Koreans were not historically so smart. Confucius may have instilled Koreans with an appreciation for the value of long, careful study, but the country had no history of excelling in math. In fact, the vast majority of its citizens were illiterate as recently as the 1950s. When the country began rebuilding its schools after the Korean War, the Korean language did not even have words for modern concepts in math and science. New words had to be coined before textbooks could be published. In 1960, Korea had a student-teacher ratio of fifty-nine to one. Only a third of Korean kids even went to middle school. Poverty predicted academic failure. If PISA had existed back then, the United States would have trounced Korea in every subject.

  Over the next fifty years, Korea became what Lee called a “talent power.” The country had no natural resources, so it cultivated its people instead, turning education into currency. This period of frenetic economic growth created a kind of lottery for Korean parents: If their children got into the best middle schools, which put them on track for the best high schools, which gave them a chance at getting into the top universities, then they would get prestigious, well-paying jobs, which would elevate the entire family.

  This competition followed very explicit rules: Score above a certain number on the college exam, and you were automatically admitted to a top university. Forever after, you would be paid more than others, even for doing the same work. The system was as predictable as it was brutal. It sent a very clear message to children about what mattered: University admissions were based on students’ skills as measured by the test. Full stop. Nobody got accepted because he was good at sports or because his parents had gone there. It was, in a way, more meritocratic than many U.S. colleges had ever been.

  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 parent
s 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.

  collateral damage

  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.