“One anecdote that truly illuminates the difference between U.S. and Finnish culture came when visitors asked librarians how they filter the Internet for students. Finnish educators didn’t understand the question, Walker says, because the concept was so foreign to them. Finally, the two responses the group got were, ‘Students know these computers are for learning,’ and ‘The filters are in students’ heads.’”

One paragraph in particular encapsulates what separates human beings who recover from trauma and those who do not. It is almost a trick of the imagination, a kind of elegant delusion that changes everything. The boy and his sister have just visited their parents in jail, for what would be the first and last time. They are alone and abandoned in the world, and yet the boy makes a decision, as they stand on a bridge, staring out at the Missouri River:

“I wondered, for just that moment, if we were like that: small, fixed figures being ordered around by forces greater than ourselves. I decided we weren’t. Whether we liked it or even knew it, we were accountable only to ourselves now, not to some greater design….And by then I was well on my way to knowing how to subordinate one thing to another—a lesson the game of chess teaches you, and does so almost immediately. The events that made all the difference to our parents’ lives were becoming secondary to the events carrying me onward from that August day….I believe that’s ... why I felt freed…why my heart was beating hard with exhilaration.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a grown-up author occupy the voice of a teenager so completely. That is hard to do. I keep having to remind myself that this experience did not actually happen to Richard Ford. It is fiction, which makes it brilliant.

“American teachers’ experience of testing is very different from that of their counterparts in the top-performing countries.  They see cheap tests, unrelated to what they teach and incapable of measuring the things they really care about, being used to determine their fate and that of their students.  What is ironic about this is that, because these other countries do much less accountability testing than we do, they can afford to spend much more on the tests they do use, and so are getting much better tests at costs that are probably no greater than what we are spending for our cheap tests.”

Now some are taking their rage out on the Common Core, a new set of voluntary, rigorous standards designed by educators around the country.

That is a mistake, understandable as it may be. And it’s one that could grow into a tragedy over the next year if things continue as they are.

Here’s what we know for sure: The U.S. urgently needs more rigorous standards aligned to international benchmarks. That is what the Common Core does. I have traveled to the most impressive school systems in the world, and their standards look a lot like the Common Core.

But to sell this idea to a wary public, the proponents of the Common Core need to make a deal: In exchange for subjecting students and teachers to new tests, ones which will be harder (since that is what happens when things get, er, harder), they need to give something up. Cancel other tests. Reduce the total number of testing days by half.

And please, for the love of God, insist that the new Common Core tests are actually smarter. There must be essays, and they must be graded by humans. Enough is enough. Abandon the insulting tests and spend the money on meaningful ones. Or you will see more and more kids and parents refusing to take even smarter tests, more teachers gaming the system or just quitting their jobs, and politicians will eventually buckle under the pressure and give up on the Common Core—the most meaningful step towards rigor taken by the United States in decades.

The panel features Sir Michael Barber (formerly of McKinsey and UK P.M. Blair’s administration, now at Pearson), Jon Schnur (former education adviser to Presidents Obama and Clinton, now at America Achieves) and Joanne Weiss (formerly head of Race to the Top and now Chief of Staff to Ed Sec Arne Duncan). All of these people have visited schools around the world and spent years trying to figure out what works in America.

I’ve moderated a lot of panels, and I have to say that many of them were dubious in some way: too many people, the wrong people, an unanswerable question, etc. But this line-up has the potential to be truly fascinating, and I am very excited to hear what comes out of it. Hope to see some of you there.

I don’t mean China. And I won’t, not anytime soon.

It’s true that teenagers in Shanghai, a huge, booming city in China, trounced teenagers on every continent on an international test of critical thinking in math, reading and science in 2009. Their performance was remarkable. Truly. In math, their poorest kids outperformed our richest kids.

But concluding anything about China from Shanghai’s results is like using test scores from Minneapolis to make assumptions about Detroit; one has almost nothing to do with the other. Millions of school-aged Chinese kids are not enrolled in school—still. Millions more do not have access to anything approaching a decent education. Children of migrant workers often cannot get the papers they need to attend city schools, so their parents must pay for worse-quality private schools. All of which begs the question: How well are Shanghai’s schools really doing if large numbers of lower-income kids are systematically refused entry?

A nice reality check from BusinessWeek:

Fifteen-year-old Zhan Haite, whose parents hail from relatively poor Jiangxi province, was born in the city of Zhuhai in Guangdong province, where her parents first worked. When she was 5 they moved to Shanghai, where her father now installs phones. After attending primary and middle school in the city, she was refused entry to high school because she is still registered as a Jiangxi resident. She got national attention in the media late last year after she organized an online campaign to change education restrictions on migrant workers’ children. “I want to end the tragedy of migrant children having to go back to the countryside to study,” says Zhan.

Of course, this is hard to find out—for about a thousand reasons, most of which are boring. But the closest thing I’ve seen to an imperfect answer comes from the OECD’s 2002 Education at a Glance report. The survey asked 15-year-olds around the world if they “often felt bored” at school. It’s worth noting that “often” and “bored” are words with very different definitions depending on the culture you live in…but let’s play along for now just for kicks.

Across the developed world, 1 out of every 2 students (48%) said they often felt bored at school.

But that was just the average. The percentages varied quite a bit from place to place. The most boring country? Well, of the 32 nations in the study, Ireland took last place—with 67% teenagers reporting that they often felt bored. Greece and Spain did just about as badly. In the U.S., 61% of high schoolers said they often felt bored—not the worst, but above average relative to the rest of the globe.

Oddly, Portugal fared best, with only 24% of 15-year-olds claiming to be frequently bored. There seemed to be no correlation between a country’s overall education outcomes and the boredom index. For example, countries with teenagers who dramatically outperform our own on tests of critical thinking in math, reading and science (Finland, Canada and Australia, to name a few), have just about as many bored kids, relatively speaking.

The full report is not easily available online (though you can see the relevant chart if you search “bored” in this document.) A more friendly version that includes fewer countries is here.

The sheer volume—and outrage and creativity—of their laments was part awesome, part tragic. I wondered what would happen if we could somehow capture all that energy, all those empty hours?

For now, unsure what else to do, I have documented an hour of grievances, from 2 to 3 pm ET on March 15, 2013, to remind adults what it is like to be made to wait or be silent or do mind-numbing tasks of no import. (Note: This is not even close to a comprehensive list.)

By the time I get out of school today I will be a pro at all the games on my phone! #bored @KenzleyWilson

Watching Big Bang theory in math class #bored #whereareyouspringbreak instagr.am/p/W44gpHl3oU/ @c_partyrocker

When class is pointless.. #shouldnthavecome #bored @Kenzers_96

When I call my mom in math class.. #bored @MerMer_Paige

I hate watching movies in class. #bored @bekkachrist

In English before #Bored #Netherhall #School #Lewis #Southwell pic.twitter.com/Kr4pg9bnjb @Lee_Farish

Survived math test this period…I think. Now gotta live thru next 4 periods til spring break! #OhYeah #Bored @jayna_lei

Been in class for 10 minutes and I already finished the assignment that is supposed to take 60. #bored @KilliynHope

Caught me slippin , #what #i #do #in #school , #texting #bored #bummmmm instagr.am/p/W4z1jxHcOM/ @Ayo_Judayy

Wish my mom could come pick me up from school..#Bored @CaitlinWilkie1

Documenting time passing during class #bored #timegoesbysoslowly instagr.am/p/W4yfi6r65X/ @juliaa_nicole

This class can end anytime now! #Bored @motorgabe707

I haven’t done anything in school all day besides take the [Ohio Graduation Test] #Bored @AnnaReneeSadows

Can we just skip to the part where school is over and it’s summer? #school #summer #bored #hatewinter #iwantsummer #now @jamiestark16

I’m so glad my mom is making me stay at school since I’m not doing anything in any of my classes. #sarcasm #bored #annoyed @amariiee13

At school. #Bored @Raccccheeeel

Bored in class…. #sleepy #bored #tired #school instagr.am/p/W4ws6Axf83/ @Cster_

This is what I do when I’m bored in class #bored #school pic.twitter.com/z9u9suB0An @ChristineLangg

Math class, #bored @rachyboom1234

English Class #Bored #BadLighting #Whatever instagr.am/p/W4xu7wJkLt/ @_TheNamesShania

You get the idea. The bottom line is that if you did a word cloud for kids’ Tweets from school, it would probably look like this.
   

“[T]wo of Hollywood’s largest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, have invested small sums in CreativeLive that signal their interest in using the company’s service as a new outlet for their celebrity clients.”

Here’s why this matters: Two of the country’s most unique and potent exports are higher education and Hollywood. Until now, they had little reason to intersect.

But online classes are different than the in-person kind: Not only do they have a huge potential profit upside, given the ability to attract tens of thousands of students worldwide, but they are, at their best, performances. No one likes to say this out loud in academia, but it’s true: the most impactful MOOCs are also entertaining. The teacher does not need to be a singing, dancing, joke-telling maniac, but the teacher does need to be riveting, one way or another. The production quality needs to be high. Or the students will evaporate, clicking off to Facebook or Twitter or one of the many other online classes multiplying on the Internet.

Enter Hollywood.

If these industries combined their talents intelligently, the U.S. could dominate the online learning marketplace for decades to come. But that’s a big If…

“Pupils…will derive satisfaction and pleasure from understanding and solving problems.”

“Pupils will…learn to justify their solutions and conclusions by means of pictures and concrete models and tools, in writing and orally; and to find similarities, differences, regularities and cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena…”

Enough said.

Happily, in a TED talk (filmed this summer but posted online this month), Schleicher has distilled his thoughts into points that almost everyone can follow. You still can’t really see the data on his slides, but never mind that. His words get the job done. The data, I think, is really for him, like a security blanket woven by PowerPoint.

If you have 19 minutes for a coffee break, I’d suggest checking it out. If you don’t, here are a few highlights:

On Spending:

“Spending per student explains less than 20% of the performance variation between countries.”

On Cultural Capital:

“I know you won’t believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school. Those places exist.”

On Mindset:

“[P]lacing a high value on education is just part of the picture. The other part is to believe that all children are capable of success.”

My one question is: Couldn’t high school be less toxic? Senior doesn’t get into this, suggesting that the problem is endemic to grouping large numbers of strangers together in one building. I don’t know if I buy that; I think there are probably huge degrees of toxicity, just as their are in different families or offices.

I would love to know what makes one high school more sadistic than another…

I had nothing to do with this graphic. It was compiled by Time’s graphics folks.

For what it’s worth: I agree it was a foolish mistake. I am glad Time has acknowledged the error.

The correction appears to be behind a paywall, so I’ll reprint it here: “In a graphic, we listed the price of a 600-round magazine but mischaracterized its use. That magazine is for an airsoft pellet gun, not an actual firearm.”

Embarrassing. Wish I had noticed it. Please stop the hating.

Can technology (finally) disrupt this narrative? I am skeptical but still curious…