The Smartest Kids in the World (15 page)

“Kids are the same in both countries,” Jenny said. “They’re kids! The difference is the way they’ve been raised. They have this thing, Korean kids; this thing that drives them.”

And now Jenny had it, too. She ranked twenty-seventh in her sophomore class at Namsan, out of about four hundred students. She had different standards for herself than she’d had in the States. “I need to do better. I regret not working harder this year,” she told Eric, shaking her head. She looked genuinely distressed, despite how well she had done. Eric was perplexed. It was like listening to an Olympic swimmer complain about being out of shape. Jenny was in the top 10 percent of her class, but it wasn’t enough. He started to realize that there was a masochism around studying that united Korean students. They berated themselves to keep themselves going.

Like most Koreans he had met, Jenny had high expectations for herself and a low opinion of her performance. He wondered if she would have judged herself differently if she’d stayed in the United
States. Would her standards have slipped down to earth, just the way they’d rocketed to the stars in Korea? Was drive entirely relative?

Jenny was about to find out. Next year, she told Eric, she had to go back to the United States, this time to New Jersey. Her family was moving yet again.

“I don’t want to leave my friends,” Jenny said, her face darkening. “But they keep telling me how jealous they are—that I’m escaping.”

Back at the apartment, Eric took out the Nintendo DS he’d brought from home. His younger host brother recognized it like an old friend, and started asking Eric all about the games he played.

“Do you want to play?” Eric offered.

“No, no, I can’t,” he said, shaking his head.

A while back, his mother had caught his older brother playing his Nintendo DS before he’d finished his homework, so she’d confiscated his game console. That wasn’t all; to make her disapproval widely known, she had also taken away the younger brother’s Nintendo DS. He was entirely innocent, but months later, he still had not gotten the game console back. He didn’t know if he would ever get it back.

When it came to education, Eric’s host mother did not send mixed messages. She cooked dinner for her kids every night and worked hard to make every opportunity available to them; but on the subject of studying, she did not negotiate. They had to work hard—especially in English—and school took priority over everything else.

She did not hold the American to the same standards, for which Eric was very grateful. She treated him with patience and kindness, as if he were an adorable grandson. Yet she dealt with her own kids the way a coach might treat his star players. Her job was to train those kids, to push them, and even bench them to prove a point. Her job was not to protect them from strain.

From what Eric had seen, his host mom was not unusual. Most
Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders. He could tell that Korean kids encountered high expectations very early in their lives, and not just in school.

Parenting, like drive and diligence, was often ignored in international studies of education. The evidence that did exist tended to focus on one country only, and it generally showed what you’d expect: More involved families had children with higher grades, better test scores, improved behavior, and better attendance records. That dynamic held true across all ages, races, and income levels in the United States. But what kinds of parental involvement mattered most? And did parents do different things in different countries?

Andreas Schleicher, the PISA scientist, noticed after the first PISA test in 2000 that a student’s home environment dramatically affected scores. He wanted to know more about how families shaped education, so he tried to get all the participating countries to agree to survey parents. Most countries’ officials were more interested in the traditional levers of education policy, however: the in-school factors like spending and class size that they felt they could control, which was a pity, since parents could control a lot, too, if they knew what mattered.

By 2009, Schleicher and his colleagues had managed to convince
thirteen countries and regions to include parents in the PISA. Five thousand of the students who took the PISA test brought home a special survey for their parents. The survey asked how they had raised their children and participated in their education, starting from when they were very young.

Strange patterns emerged. For example,
parents who volunteered in their kids’ extracurricular activities had children who performed
worse
in reading, on average, than parents who did not volunteer, even after controlling for other factors like socioeconomic background. Out of thirteen very different places, there were only two (Denmark and New Zealand) in which parental volunteering had any positive impact on scores at all, and it was small.

How could this be? Weren’t the parents who volunteered in the school community showing their children how much they valued education? Weren’t the mothers who chaperoned field trips and fathers who brought orange slices to soccer games the ones with the most time and energy to devote to their children? The data was baffling. Yet other research within the United States revealed the same mysterious dynamic: volunteering in children’s schools and attending school events seemed to have little effect on how much kids learned.

One possible explanation might be that the parents who were volunteering were more active precisely
because
their children were struggling at school. And it is possible that their children would have performed even worse if the parents had
not
gotten involved. Then again, maybe the volunteering parents were spending their limited time coaching basketball and running school auctions, leaving less energy for the kinds of actions that
did
help their kids learn.

By contrast, other parental efforts yielded big returns, the survey suggested. When children were young, parents who read to them every day or almost every day had kids who performed much better in reading, all around the world, by the time there were fifteen. It sounded like a public-service cliché: Read to your kids. Could it be that simple?

Yes, it could, which was not to say that it was uninteresting. After all, what did reading to your kids mean? Done well, it meant teaching them about the world—sharing stories about faraway places, about smoking volcanoes and little boys who were sent to bed without dinner. It meant asking them questions about the book, questions that encouraged them to think for themselves. It meant sending a signal to kids about the importance of not just reading but of learning about all kinds of new things.

As kids got older, the parental involvement that seemed to matter most was different but related. All over the world, parents who discussed movies, books, and current affairs with their kids had teenagers who performed better in reading. Here again, parents who engaged
their kids in conversation about things larger than themselves were essentially teaching their kids to become thinking adults. Unlike volunteering in schools, those kinds of parental efforts delivered clear and convincing results, even across different countries and different income levels.

In fact,
fifteen-year-olds whose parents talked about complicated social issues with them not only scored better on PISA but reported enjoying reading more overall. In New Zealand and Germany, students whose parents had read to them regularly in their early elementary years performed almost a year and a half ahead of students whose parents had not.

Research from within the United States echoed these findings. What parents did with children at home seemed to matter more than what parents did to help out at school. And yet this finding ran counter to the ideals of modern American parenting.

Stereotypically speaking, American parenting in the early twenty-first century might have been called
Parent Teacher Association parenting. PTA parents cared deeply about their children and went out of their way to participate in school functions. They knew education was important, and in fact, American parents tended to be more highly educated than parents in most developed countries.

At the same time, many American parents worried about robbing their children of the joys of childhood through structured learning. They suspected that children learned best through undirected free play—and that a child’s psyche was sensitive and fragile. During the 1980s and 1990s, American parents and teachers had been bombarded by claims that children’s self-esteem needed to be protected from competition (and reality) in order for them to succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer
teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans.

These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In most of the countries where parents took the PISA survey,
parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse in reading.

Korean parenting, by contrast, were coaches.
Coach parents cared deeply about their children, too. Yet they spent less time attending school events and more time training their children at home: reading to them, quizzing them on their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner, and pushing them to try harder. They saw education as one of their jobs.

This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to
actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the
same
schools.

While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math.

The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated.
Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that
European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too.

Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they
were young raised children who
scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit.

And at least one high-impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all:
If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said.

Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were.

Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self-control or endurance—experiences that mattered as much or more than academic skills.

The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study,
85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to
assure them they were smart. However, the actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere, or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. It had a toxic effect, the opposite of what parents intended.

To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms. In the survey of exchange students conducted for this book, about half of U.S. and international students said that American math teachers were more likely to praise their work than math teachers abroad. (Fewer than 10 percent said that their international teachers were more likely to praise.) That finding was particularly ironic, given that American students scored below average for the developed world in math. It also suggested that whatever the intent of American teachers, their praise was probably not always specific, authentic, and rare.

Adults didn’t have to be stern or aloof to help kids learn. In fact, just asking children about their school days and showing genuine interest in what they were learning could have the
same effect on PISA scores as hours of private tutoring. Asking serious questions about a child’s book had more value than congratulating the child for finishing it, in other words.