Free The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley Page 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 theprinting 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 astudent-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 hisparents 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 risenabout 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