Tom, attending school in Poland, liked the feeling that he was treated more as an adult than he felt he was in the US. "That autonomy was not always pleasant, however," Ripley wrote. "If teenagers were capable of taking care of themselves after school, they were also expected to face facts during school. They were not protected from hard truths. In one class, Tom remembered, the teacher announced the exam scores aloud. He was stunned when he heard the results: Twenty-two out of twenty-six kids had failed... School didn't necessarily seem better in Poland, in Tom's opinion, but it did seem less forgiving."
Kacper Pempel/Reuters
