The Smartest Kids in the World (14 page)

Two girls from her class sat down next to her. They said hello to Kim and started talking about how hard they’d studied for midterm exams last year, lamenting all the work they had ahead of them.

Most of the time, the Finnish students were just as aloof as her guide books had told her they would be. But Kim was still new enough that she could ask them about Finland to make conversation. So, she collected her courage and blurted out the question that had been on her mind.

“Why do you guys care so much?”

The girls looked at her, confused. Kim felt her cheeks flush, but she barreled ahead.

“I mean, what makes you work hard in school?”

It was a hard question to answer, she realized, but she had to ask. These girls went to parties; they texted in class and doodled in their notebooks. They were normal, in other words. Yet they seemed to respect the basic premise of school, and Kim wanted to know why.

Now, both girls looked baffled, as if Kim had just asked them why they insisted on breathing so much.

“It’s school,” one of them said finally. “How else will I graduate and go to university and get a good job?”

Kim nodded. It was a fair question. Maybe the real mystery was not why Finnish kids cared so much, but why so many of her Oklahoma classmates did not. After all, for them, too, getting a good education was the only way to go to college and get a good job. Somewhere along the way, however, many of them had stopped believing in this equation. They didn’t take education very seriously. Maybe because
they were lazy, spoiled, or dysfunctional in some other way, or maybe because, in their experience, education wasn’t all that serious.

Listening to Kim’s impressions of Finland, I wondered if she were unique. Kim came from a relatively low-performing state, and no one would say she had an overly generous attitude toward her hometown. Would other exchange students notice the same differences? What about a teenager traveling in the opposite direction? Would a Finnish girl who’d chosen to come to the United States see a mirror image of what Kim had noticed in Finland?

Every year,
about four hundred Finnish kids travel to the United States to live and study. Most of them ended up in the Midwest in public high schools. To find out what they thought of their borrowed land, I started tracking them down. It didn’t take long to notice a pattern.

Elina came to America from Helsinki when she was sixteen, the same age as Kim. She came because she’d spent much of her life dreaming about the American high schools she saw on television and in movies: the prom, the pep rallies, and all the twinkling rituals of the American teenager.

In America, Elina lived with a host family in Colon, Michigan, a small town named after the punctuation mark, just outside Kalamazoo. At first, Elina’s new world looked a lot like home. Colon was surrounded by lakes and trees. The population was 95 percent white and native born. On weekends, men zipped themselves into down jackets and played ice hockey on frozen lakes. The winter lasted most of the year, just like back home.

Early on, however, Elina discovered one important difference about America. Back home, she’d been a good student. In Colon, she was exceptional. She took Algebra II, the most advanced math class offered at Colon High. On her first test, she got 105 percent. Until
then, Elina had thought it was mathematically impossible to get 105 percent on anything.

She thought she might have more trouble in U.S. history class, since she was not, after all, American. Luckily, her teacher gave the class a study guide that contained all the questions—and answers—to the exam. On test day, Elina coasted through the questions because, well, she’d seen them in advance.

When the teacher handed the tests back, Elina was unsurprised to see she’d gotten an A. She was amazed, however, to see that some of the other students had gotten Cs. One of them looked at her and laughed at the absurdity.

“How is it possible you know this stuff ?”

“How is it possible you
don’t
know this stuff ?” Elina answered.

I talked to Elina after she had left the United States and gone to college in Finland. She was planning to work in foreign affairs one day. Now that some time had gone by, I wondered if she had a theory about what she’d seen in her American school. Were the students too coddled? Or the opposite—too troubled? Too diverse? Maybe they were demoralized by all the standardized testing?

Elina didn’t think so. In her experience, American kids didn’t study much because, well, they didn’t have to. “Not much is demanded of U.S. students,” she said. In Finland, her exams were usually essay tests, requiring her to write three or four pages in response. “You really have to study. You have to prove that you know it,” Elina told me about Finnish high school. In the United States, her tests were typically multiple choice.

“It was like elementary school in Finland,” she said. In that history class, she remembers, the class spent an inordinate amount of time making posters. “We did so many posters. I remember telling my friends, ‘Are you kidding me? Another poster?’ ” It was like arts and crafts, only more boring. The teacher gave all the students the information for the poster, and the kids just had to cut and glue their way to a finished product. Everybody’s poster featured the same subject.

The expectations were lower in America, Elina concluded, and the consequences were, too. She took a journalism class in Colon that was taught by an outstanding teacher. Everyone loved this teacher, including Elina. More important, perhaps, they respected her, and knew they were learning in her class. However, when the teacher told everyone they had to write ten articles by the end of the semester, only Elina actually did all ten stories. The teacher was irritated, but the other students still passed the class.

Elina and Kim’s observations were anecdotal to the extreme. How much could we make of a few kids’ memories? But it was remarkable how many kids from all different lands agreed on this point. In a large, national survey,
over half of American high schoolers echoed Elina’s impression, reporting that their history work was often or always too easy. Less than half said they felt like they were always or almost always learning in math class.

In my own survey of 202 foreign-exchange students, an overwhelming majority said their U.S. classes were easier than their classes abroad. (Of the international students who came to America, nine out of ten said classes were easier in the United States; of the American teenagers who went abroad, seven out of ten agreed.) School in America was many things, but it was not, generally speaking, hard.

During her year in America, Elina saw a Broadway show and visited the Washington Monument. She ran track and worked on the yearbook. She was surprised by how involved parents were in the school, much more so than parents back home. However, in the classrooms at Colon High—a school
not
overwhelmed by poverty, immigration, gangs, or any of the blights so often blamed for our educational mediocrity—she did not learn much in the traditional sense.

When Kim’s school day in Finland ended at three forty-five, it was already dark. Her classmates all headed off in different directions. A
few boys in a garage band went off to practice; some of the girls went shopping. No one Kim knew went to afterschool tutoring academies. Finnish kids had more free time than American kids, and not just because they did less homework. They were also less likely to play sports or hold down jobs.

As Kim walked through town on the way to the library, she felt hopeful. She spent a lot of time alone with her thoughts. But, she had discovered, to her relief, that life in Finland was different. The distinctions were subtle: the freedom, the freshly cooked food in the cafeteria, the civility. It was hard to describe the cumulative effect of these differences, but it felt, on days like today, as if she’d been paroled for good behavior.

The town felt cleaner and nicer than Sallisaw, like it was built for people instead of cars. As she walked along the brick pedestrian way, she passed boys with Justin Bieber hair, girls with tattoos, and billboards covered with H&M bikini ads. People dressed slightly better than they did back home, but not radically different. There were not nearly as many tall, blonde women as she had expected.

The neighborhood surrounding her school was filled with eighteenth and nineteenth century wooden houses, built after Russians sacked the village and drove out most of the townspeople in the 1700s. Kim had been keeping a mental list of the ordeals Pietarsaari had endured, from famine to communism; it had been fired on by the British Navy and bombed by the allies during World War II. The mystical land of smart children and Nokia, the one she had read about in America, was a relatively recent development.

After the library, she walked to Café Nemo, one of her favorite coffee shops. She’d come so often that the British owner had nicknamed her
Oklahoma
. She ordered in Finnish, proud to have built up a tolerance to the strong Finnish coffee.

Finally, it was time to go back to the apartment. She was out of excuses. Although she adored Susanne, her vivacious host mother, going home was one of the more stressful parts of Kim’s day.
Despite her best efforts, her five-year-old host sisters had not warmed to her. They resented the attention their busy single mother gave to this strange intruder. It made no sense to them (and indeed sometimes to Kim) that their mom had taken in yet another daughter.

When Susanne was not in the room, the girls called Kim
tyhmä
and laughed. Kim looked it up; it meant “stupid.” When she tried to study, they came in and banged on her laptop keyboard. The number four had recently stopped working. Yet her bedroom doubled as their playroom, so Kim didn’t feel she had the right to make them leave.

The girls were testing her, as small children will. Kim had never had a younger sibling, and she had no idea how—or whether—to discipline the twins. They were not her children, and she was not really their sister. She blamed herself. Each day, she vowed anew that she would find a way to make them like her.

In many ways, Finland had been the adventure she’d hoped it would be. She’d jumped into a hole in the ice in a frozen lake, an insane tradition in line with the Finns’ proud history of endurance. She’d grown to look forward to the warmth of the host family’s tiny home sauna after the cold walk home. She’d even made a couple of friends, and not all of them were exchange students.

Her biggest problem was that she herself had not changed very much—not yet, anyway. Most of the time, she felt unsure of herself. At school, she rarely spoke. At home, eager to please her host family, she stifled her frustration. Then she went quiet and sullen when the frustration built up inside her. Kim told herself it was the language barrier; it was hard to find her voice when she literally did not know the words. But this sensation felt unpleasantly familiar, like a bad habit she’d brought with her across the ocean. In her darkest hours, lying awake in her bunk bed in Pietarsaari, she wondered if the feeling would shadow her everywhere.

Accidental Tourist: Jenny at school in Busan, Korea.

Eric got on the crowded No. 80 bus, headed home after Saturday classes. The girls had stopped screaming; Eric’s celebrity status had faded. He spent a lot of his time reading
Ulysses
by himself.

“Hi. How’s it going?”

Eric looked up. A Korean girl with shoulder-length black hair pushed back behind a headband was talking to him with a pitch-perfect American accent. He’d seen her around Namsan, and he knew she lived in the same apartment complex, but he hadn’t heard such a familiar inflection in anyone’s voice since he’d left Minnesota.

“My name is Jenny.” She had a low voice and a stoic expression. But then she smiled, and her whole face lit up. Eric smiled, too.

“Why is your English perfect?”

Jenny laughed. She explained that although she was born in Korea, she’d lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when she was little. She’d spent much of her childhood in the American heartland, which explained her accent. But then, when she
was in middle school, her family had moved back to Korea. Coming back to Korean school had been a traumatic experience, and she knew exactly how Eric was feeling.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw all the kids sleeping in class,” she said. “But soon I was one of them.”

In the United States, Jenny had taken swimming lessons and played the cello. She’d gone to sleep by ten most nights. Then, in Korea, she’d started attending hagwons like all the other kids she knew. She almost always studied past midnight. Jenny was living proof of something researchers call the peer effect: She behaved differently depending on the kids sitting next to her.

“I just felt the need to study here because all my friends were doing the same thing.”

Eric talked with Jenny all the way back to the apartment building. He felt relieved to have a real Korean validate his impressions. He wasn’t just a white boy who didn’t get it; in fact, Korean high school was objectively terrible. They agreed.