What is high school like around the world? A new film lets students investigate

Sadie, a 16-year-old high school junior in Harpswell, Maine, felt off-kilter in her American high school – too much memorization, not enough relevance to hands-on work in prospective careers. “I know it doesn’t have to be like this,” she says of her school days in The Smartest Kids in the World, a new documentary on international educational systems. Brittany, a junior outside Orlando, Florida, spends hours on homework but finds her curiosity unchallenged. “I kinda just wonder … what are we doing?” she muses. Jaxon, 16, from the small town of Saratoga in south-eastern Wyoming, finds himself torn between wrestling practice and sleeping two extra hours before his ACT, where one point marks the difference between free college tuition and $30,000 a year. “It’s only my life,” he shakes his head, “practically, everything in it.”

The three students are among the many, many high school students whose education is handicapped by the diffuse, disparate and often dysfunctional American education system. The

US spends more than almost any other country per student, but that does not translate to results; according to the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), the average student in Singapore is 3.5 years ahead of her US counterpart in math, 1.5 years ahead in reading and 2.5 in science.

They’re also among the handful who experienced something different; The Smartest Kids in the World follows four US high school students as they spend a year abroad in countries who routinely outperform the US in the basics of education – South Korea, Finland, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The film, based on the 2013 book of the same name by Amanda Ripley, a contributor to Time magazine and the Atlantic, highlights the numerous shortcomings of the American education system by contrast, through the eager, at times overwhelmed eyes of four students so frustrated with their stagnation in school that they leave home for a year. “It’s a lot at stake,” said the film’s director, Tracy Droz Tragos, of the formative, fragile period that is late high school, as the paths ahead – university, community college, employment – crystallize.

The film outlines both models for change while observing “the tragedy in having hungry hearts and minds who really do want to learn and are being denied a decent education”, she said.

Ripley, who appears in the film, and the students’ frustration outline a host of quirks and concerns now baked into American secondary education: the prioritization of standardized test scores, which often ties to funding; the belief that hours of homework equates to learning; the onetracking of students to universities, the top of which are insanely compet