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In response, AGSP made it a point to include bicycles as part of this area's scholarship package. By 2010 they had given out 817 bicycles to scholars, which have proved to be beneficial in many situations, whether for a student to get herself to a crucial exam, or to ride across town to a classmate's house for an extra study session.

Kabul’s rapidly growing population has led to a severe shortage of classrooms and overcrowding in schools. In 2010, most schools in the city were teaching students in three shifts with up to 60 students per class.

“In the new classrooms, we are more comfortable than in the old ones,” says Akil, 14. “Now we have a chair for each student. Before, there was one chair for three students and it was very tiring. This new building is very good for us.”

Other improvements to create a safe, healthy and hygienic learning environment include boundary walls, recreation areas, water points and separate latrines for boys and girls. Providing a safe, attractive and sanitary environment is important for improving the enrolment and retention of girls, as studies and experience in numerous countries have shown.

The principles of child-centred learning have been taught to more than 3,000 teachers in workshops conducted by UNICEF. The workshops give teachers the skills needed to ensure that lessons focus on each child’s ability, stimulate his or her interest and participation in classroom activities, and deal with the child’s problems.

In addition, UNICEF runs workshops for student representatives and community committees to encourage their involvement in managing local schools. The results of school improvements are already starting to be seen.

The current system also leaves underfunded municipalities in charge of high school education nationwide. This has starved most schools of resources, while leaving some wealthy neighborhood schools well off. Chile’s small upper class sends its children to private schools or even overseas for their education.

Homework is done at school, which features a library, internet and assisting teachers like dos Santos.

Students also work in vegetable gardens and learn about sustainably harvesting trees and working with wood. “The goal is to have students learn skills that they can take back to develop within their communities”, Garrido said. There are also computing and internet classes, with students required to maintain a “Passion for the Amazon” blog and upload digital photographs. Students boasted email and Facebook accounts. The school has support from FAS, along with a non-governmental organization devoted to keeping alive the stories and culture of Amazonian people.

South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.

The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.

By contrast, the vast majority of teachers in the Contented group (37 percent of teachers overall) viewed teaching as a lifelong career. Most said their schools are “orderly, safe, and respectful,” and are satisfied with their administrators. Sixty-three percent strongly agreed that “teaching is exactly what I wanted to do,” and roughly three-fourths feel that they have sufficient time to craft good lesson plans. Those teachers tend to be veterans—94 percent have been in the classroom for more than 10 years, a majority have graduate degrees, and about two-thirds are teaching in middle-income or affluent schools.

However, it is the Idealists—23 percent of teachers overall—who voiced the strongest sense of mission about teaching. Nearly nine in 10 Idealists believe that “good teachers can lead all students to learn, even those from poor families or who have uninvolved parents.” Idealists overwhelmingly said that helping underprivileged children improve their prospects motivated them to enter the profession

and 36 percent said that even though they intend to stay in education, they plan to leave classroom teaching for other jobs in the field.

half the Idealists believe their students’ test scores have increased significantly as a result of their teaching, a higher percentage than the other teachers in the survey.

A 22-percentage-point difference separated the Idealists and the Disheartened (88 percent to 66 percent) in their faith that good teachers can make a difference in student learning. Idealists strongly believe that teachers shape student effort (75 percent), whereas just 50 percent of the Disheartened believe that. Only one-third of the more disillusioned teachers were very confident in their students’ learning abilities, compared with nearly half among the other groups (48 percent of the Contented and 45 percent of the Idealists).

Using science test results from the major international PISA study, which compares the performance of different education systems, it shows that there are wide differences in the levels of resilience.

Among countries, South Korea, Finland, Japan, Turkey and Canada are the most successful in terms of poorer pupils achieving high results.

But the UK is well below average and at the lower end of this ranking of resilience, with only 24% showing such examples of "resilience".

Believing that they are likely to succeed in exams is an important part of how they actually perform. The study argues that mentoring schemes can be particularly beneficial.

There is also a link between longer hours in class studying a subject and the improved chances of poorer pupils. It is also says that motivation is important - but in the form of a "personal, internal drive" rather than the promise of a reward or an incentive.