Free The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley

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 beforetheir 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 wastesting. 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