Kobe is the kind of Japanese city where a yellow light still means slow down rather than speed up. The days are calm and ordered in the old-fashioned way, with parents rushing to work in the morning and uniformed kids dawdling on the way to school. It was here that a quiet junior high school boy grew up on comic books and dreams of becoming a superhero. He was a loner, picked on at school by both teachers and students, a trial shared by countless children before him. Nobody thought it alarming; if anything, in the Japanese context, it was considered character-building, along with cramming for difficult exams or wearing shorts through the coldest of winters during elementary years. This was normal school life.
But one day, that calm continuum was broken. The 14-year-old boy was suspended from school for fighting. To pass the days away from classes, he tortured cats and collected hunting knives. One long, idle afternoon, he invited a younger schoolmate out for some fun, luring the 11-year-old to a quiet hill where he strangled him and sawed off his head. The 14-year-old placed the severed head in a plastic bag and dropped it off at the gate of his school. A note stuffed in the younger boy's mouth read, "(This is) revenge against the compulsory education system and the society that created it."
So began the deluge. In 1999, two years after the Kobe incident, a teenager stabbed and killed a seven-year-old boy on a school playground. A year after that, a 17-year-old boy who had endured taunts at school began bashing passersby with a baseball bat on one of Tokyo's busiest streets. Then it was the turn of other Asian countries. Last October in South Korea, where some child insurance policies now cover school violence, a 16-year-old boy surnamed Kim walked into his social studies class and fatally stabbed a boy who had picked on him. The same month in Hong Kong, seven-year-old Ng Dik-wai failed an exam in Chinese dictation, went home and leaped out of his high-rise apartment—earning him a place as among Asia's youngest education victims.
The East Asian economic miracle was built on a number of sturdy pillars: hard work, high savings rates and Confucian values—in particular, an almost fanatical belief in the value of education. And for years, Asia could rest easy in the know-ledge that its school systems were producing the best and the brightest. Rising GDPs were proof, so were the calculus prodigies and engineers churned out by the millions. East Asian students almost always scored higher in international math and science tests—across the board, country by country—than their counterparts in the West. All you had to do was walk into an Asian classroom to see what they were doing right. Students were diligent, quiet, involved in copying down the daily lessons. It was nothing like the chaos of, say, American schools with the spitballs and pierced eyebrows and the emphasis on attitude with-a-capital-A. Education experts enjoined America's teachers to look East.
The contrast isn't so stark anymore. Recent math and science test scores show U.S. students gaining ground on their counterparts in Asia. And with their rote-based curricula and examcentric systems, Asians are finding that even children who attend the very best public schools lack the creative skills to compete in a new, challenging information economy. Who can name more than a handful of famous East Asian scientists or mathematicians—if that many? And now, some of the ailments of the West have come East. The dropout phenomenon, once considered exclusively Western, has reached Asian shores: in 1999, a record 130,000 Japanese primary and junior high school students refused to attend school for more than a month. The trendiest neighborhoods in Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei are filled with disaffected kids playing hooky, their ennui relieved by designer drugs and designer shopping.
Most alarming is the towering degree of unhappiness among Asian kids. Schools are suddenly plagued with record levels of violent crime and sky-high suicide rates. In Hong Kong, one in three teens have had suicidal thoughts, up 28% from two years ago. The number of teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 in Thailand who commit suicide is second only to adult workers. Those children may be on the extreme edge, but some of the kids in the front rows are almost as unhappy and frustrated. "Something has gone very wrong with our schools," says Hiroshi Yoshimoto, a director in the education reform division of Japan's Education Ministry. "We all know we have to reform—yesterday."