From Nicholas Kristof's New York Times op-ed essay "What if the Valedictorians in America’s Schools Were the Cool Kids?" (7 Feb 2026):

As America’s democracy and society have struggled in recent years, caught in an authoritarian riptide and mired in inequality and discontent, I’ve wondered about the lessons that we Americans can learn from some of the successes of Asia.

The one I focus on is the transformative power of education. It’s not a new thought, of course, and it’s one I’ve puzzled over since my wife and I began visiting schools in Asia in the 1980s and sending our kids to school in Japan in the 1990s. Every time I visit, I feel a pang of envy for societies that seem to value education more than America does.

The passion reflects a tradition in the Confucian belt of East Asia that the path to glory is to study. Even today in Chinese villages, you occasionally come across an ancient “paifang” monument to some local man who centuries ago earned a “jinshi” degree with top honors in the imperial exams. (When was the last time you saw an American village commemorating a local Ph.D.?)

In a modern echo, in some East Asian schools I’ve visited, students and teachers alike have explained that the “hot” girls and boys are the valedictorians. It’s nerd heaven, and this set of values leads many students to work extraordinarily hard.

... and Kristof's conclusion:

… Maybe we could acknowledge the inequity of local school finance that results in sending rich kids to good schools and poor kids to weak schools? Perhaps politicians could stop demonizing universities and taxing their endowments? What if we respected human capital as much as financial capital?

... and in a Toki Pona nutshell, perhaps something like:

kama sona li suli sewi

_{(cf Education, Culture, and Blame (2000-06-01), Education of the Youth (2001-12-01), Freedom Peace Commerce Education (2002-09-13), Liberal Education (2005-11-02), Vartan Gregorian on Libraries (2010-04-23), ...) - ^z - 23026-02-09}