That’s the lesson of Marin County lawyer Gary Friedman, as recounted in journalist Amanda Ripley’s 2021 book High Conflict: How We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.  Ripley’s masterful work is not a California book—it recounts conflicts from Chicago to Colombia—but it is what Californians should read if they want to navigate more peacefully through this polarizing time.

And it has an unforgettable California character in Gary Friedman.

Friedman is the godfather of conflict mediation. He has an uncanny ability to help people listen to each other, and to tap into their best selves at difficult moments. He started by representing both sides in divorces—putting spouses in the same room—in the late 1970s. Since then, he’s mediated thousands of cases, handled all sorts of disputes (including the 1996–97 San Francisco Symphony strike), taught lawyers and law students at Stanford and Harvard how to navigate conflict, and published books on negotiating.

‘When conflict takes over, it creates its own reality,” Friedman and Jack Himmelstein cautioned in 2008’s Challenging Conflict: Mediation Through Understanding.

Friedman had lived in Muir Beach, an unincorporated community of under 400 people, for decades when a neighbor suggested he run for local office in 2015. Friedman thought that, as a board member of the Community Services District in charge of roads and water, he could change the tone and reduce the conflict in local politics.

Then he won—and forgot his own lessons about avoiding the traps of conflict.

He and his allies called themselves the “New Guard,” turning “Old Guard” board members and longtime staff into adversaries. Elected the board’s president, Friedman got rid of the snacks and social time that built connection and understanding. And he made rapid changes to the board’s practices that produced a backlash.

He tried instituting shorter, more efficient public meetings by imposing new rules and time limits on speakers. But some locals complained about restrictions on their expression. In the name of inclusiveness, he started new volunteer sub-committees—so many different subcommittees that they became a joke. And in making all of these changes, he didn’t explain himself clearly—a common mistake, since people overestimate how well others understand us. He didn’t listen as much or stay as intentionally curious as he had as a lawyer-mediator.

Then, he made a big policy mistake—on water, that most conflict-heavy subject here in California. To compensate for higher management costs that had built up over years, he proposed the immediate doubling of water rates, rather than a phased-in plan. And as the “Old Guard” criticized him and his policies, he started to feel under attack, which made him more defensive and aggressive. His everyday relations with neighbors soured. His view of the Muir Beach battle grew grandiose—in conversation, he associated the Old Guard with Trump. He even attacked his critics in an online post.

“I couldn’t get it out of my head,” he later told Ripley. “It felt like we were at war.”

“Hearing Gary talk this way,” Ripley writes, “was alternately reassuring and alarming. On the one hand, if even the godfather of conflict mediation can’t help getting pulled into conflict traps, then we can all be forgiven for some of our pettiest moments. On the other hand, it felt ominous. If Gary could not resist the grasp, what hope is there for the rest of us?”

When Friedman’s board ally lost re-election in 2017, the “Old Guard” took back over. Humiliated, Friedman contemplated resigning from the board, but decided to stay on—and to better understand the conflict.

He voted himself out of the board presidency, voted to get rid of his own sub-committees, and looked for ways to support his opponents. He distanced himself from what the book calls “fire starters”—people who had previously encouraged him to fight politically. He made fewer comments at meetings, and he talked more about his gardening, as a way of making lighter, more positive connections with people. Eventually, he found himself recovering from what he called his “personal derangement.”

As Friedman and Ripley both explain in the book, some conflict is good and healthy—when movement and questions and curiosity lead the people involved to understanding and a better place.

But too much conflict is high conflict—where the conflict is so stagnant that the conflict itself becomes the destination. There is no winning such quagmires, which Ripley compares to L.A.’s La Brea Tar Pits—which first trapped prey, then the predators in pursuit.

“High conflict makes us miserable,” she writes. “It is costly, in every sense. Money, blood, friendships.”

When I left a phone message for Friedman recently, he called right back. “I think I really learned humility in a much deeper way,” he says. “Also, maybe it’s really surprising, but people like me a lot more now when they see I’ve failed.”

Friedman is 77 now, and I asked him if he had wised up and retired from the conflict-mad world of California local politics.

He immediately said no.

“I feel very strongly that our community is upside down—our houses have become worth so much that we’re systematically kicking out people,” he says. “Affordable housing is a big challenge. The community is generally not inclined toward it. I’m trying to figure out how to lay the ground—how we can have the conversation in this community and turn it into a reality.”

I couldn’t help chuckling. Housing might be the only California issue that can rival water’s power to trap a person in high conflict.  At least Friedman now has even more experience in how to escape it.

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So how does the new SAT compare to the university entrance exam in a place like South Korea, a test-crazed culture if ever there was one? Or Finland—a country that boasts a high school graduation rate of 96 percent (compared to 77 percent in the United States) and, like Korea, scores at the top of the world on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, test (administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)?

In at least three ways, the new SAT looks a bit worldlier than it did before—which is good news. For one thing, this revamped test is designed to judge whether students have learned the things they were supposed to learn in school. In other words, it is more tightly aligned to the specific standards most schools now teach.

That may seem like a no-brainer, but since the United States always had a patchwork of nonsensical, mismatched standards in different districts and states, aligning national tests with what actually happens in schools was always easier said than done. Now that 46 states have adopted the Common Core State Standards (even if some are now regretting their decision), we can do what other countries have done for a long time. By matching itself up with these more challenging, more consistent standards, the redesigned SAT will almost certainly add coherence, rigor, and clarity to an education system that lacks all three.

The new SAT also includes an essay, though it is now optional. For students who opt in, the essay entails a very different kind of writing. Before, SAT-takers were asked to cite their own experiences or values in response to a statement—a painfully banal form of writing bearing little resemblance to most college and professional writing. The new test asks students to analyze evidence in response to a passage, requiring them to cite specific examples and explain how an author built an argument. That kind of writing is more similar to college entrance exams in the world’s education powerhouses.

Finally, the College Board’s efforts to make the new SAT more accessible to low-income kids are also encouraging—and internationally competitive. The U.S. education system is notoriously inequitable compared to other developed nations, with the most affluent neighborhoods hoarding the most experienced teachers and well-resourced classrooms. But by partnering with Khan Academy’s website to offer free test prep, the SAT is making a small effort to democratize test prep—something that South Korea did a decade ago, when it started offering free test prep through its public broadcasting TV and radio programs (and eventually online), turning its best tutors into celebrities. Truth be told, Korea’s free test prep did little to disrupt the country’s booming, private test-prep industry, but it is clearly one baby step toward equity, especially in rural areas.

But the similarities between the new SAT and its foreign counterparts end there, rather abruptly. Finland’s test is far more challenging than the SAT (and the ACT) in almost every other way—even in sheer duration. Finland is famous for having very few standardized tests (high school students take a lot of tests, but the tests are designed by their teachers—not a distant testing corporation). But during their senior year, Finnish kids do take one giant standardized test known as the Matura—the mother of all tests. This test lasts about 50 hours, stretched out over three long weeks. By contrast, the new SAT will last three hours and 50 minutes with the optional essay (or three hours without).

And in Finland, the essay is not optional. To the contrary, students spend a day writing short essays in response to several texts over the course of six hours. The next day, they choose one topic out of 14 options and write one long essay—over the course of another six hours. One recent topic was, “Why is it difficult to achieve peace in the Middle East?” That’s 12 hours of writing—compared to 50 minutes (or zero, for those who choose not to do the essay) on the new SAT.

None of this would matter very much if it weren’t also true that Finland’s entire system is more rigorous. These tests tend to reflect the rest of the story, in every country. In Korea, the test (known as the College Scholastic Ability Test, or CSAT) lasts eight hours, and the stock exchange opens an hour late so that students won’t have to deal with traffic jams on their way to the exam.

All around the world, the test is a symbol of what matters (or doesn’t) in a given country. So the new SAT is a promising sign for the evolution of the U.S. system writ large. Our average elementary and secondary schools still do not have nearly enough well-educated, highly trained, and supported teachers; our teenagers still are not learning critical thinking at the level of students in Finland or Korea (especially in math and science); and our average colleges still are not compensating for these weaknesses (which persist through adulthood for most Americans). But if the SAT can become more rigorous and more equitable, then maybe—just maybe—our schools and neighborhoods can do so as well.

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The Korean school system is not famous for fun. But in that classroom at Jeong Bal High School on that day, great fun was had. The kids blushed, laughed and cheered. I saw scorned lovers, burned-out rock stars and, perhaps inevitably, a “Who farted?” skit, which was the audience favorite despite its questionable narrative arc.

In fact, the class could have been in America, a country renowned for its creativity – except for one critical difference. After all the students sat down, still tittering about their theatrical exploits, the teacher walked to the front of the room and read their names and grades aloud. It happened so fast and with so little ado that I almost didn’t notice. The kids listened to their scores, which ranged from mediocre to perfect, and then headed off to their next class.

I’ve spent the past few months traveling around the world visiting different schools and trying to figure out what we can learn from them back home. In Korean high schools, kids all know each other’s grades and class rank. High school tests are all graded on a curve. This competition goes too far, as anyone in Korea will tell you. But I am starting to suspect that American schools have the opposite problem.

Kids here are protected from competition and suffering, even in high school. In a 2010 survey sponsored by Intel, for example, 85 percent of the American teenagers interviewed said they were very or somewhat confident in their math and science abilities – despite our consistently unimpressive performance on the world stage in both subjects.

In a 2003 OECD test of 15-year-olds around the world, kids were asked whether they generally get good grades in math. Out of 41 countries and regions, guess which country scored highest? A blaring 72 percent of American kids reported that they get good grades in math, topping the world – even as our kids’ work ranked 24th on the actual math problems on the very same exam.

The kids who knew the most math on that test tended to come from countries where good grades were scarce. In Japan, only 28 percent of kids said they got good marks in math. In Korea, only 36 percent said so.

I returned home from Korea to discover Lori Gottlieb’s Atlantic cover story on how the cult of self-esteem parenting is handicapping our kids. Since the 1980s, indicators of self-esteem have gone up among U.S. middle-school, high-school and college students, she reported. But at the same time, rates of anxiety and depression have risen among these cohorts. As a psychotherapist, Gottlieb noticed this generational emptiness in many of her young patients – and began to see the connections in her life as a parent. Modern parents, she argues, bend over backwards to protect their kids from falling – and then wonder why they have such poor balance when they grow up.

This same culture of coddling extends to the classroom. Despite all our agonizing about over-testing our kids, the vast majority of standardized tests have zero consequences. We call them “high-stakes” tests, but they are only high-stakes for our schools and (in some places) our teachers. They are no-stakes for kids, who are likely to experience far more agonizing over real life’s setbacks on the football field than they do in the classroom.

In fact, in other parts of the world, from Korea to Finland to Poland, standardized tests are used very differently – primarily to motivate and sort students, not schools. Although upper-income American parents lament the pressure on their kids to get into a top university or get a high SAT score, that stress is child’s play compared to what other kids experience in the fastest-growing economies in the world. Relatively speaking, we wait until our kids grow up to let them discover (too late) that the world is a brutally competitive place.

Interestingly, American kids are clear-eyed about our country’s academic limitations overall. On that same 2010 Intel survey, even as a healthy majority of the American kids said they get high marks in math, 90 percent of them ranked other countries as better at math and science.

Lucky for them, American kids aren’t graded on a global curve. Indeed, they take math in a special class, quite apart from the rest of the world. This class is a rather dull and forgiving place, relatively speaking. American math classes offer less challenging content, as evidenced by multiple studies comparing curricula in different nations. They are often taught by teachers who know less math themselves than their counterparts in top-performing countries. And in this soft moon bounce of a classroom, most of our kids have little reason to doubt their own prowess.

Now, before I am accused of being just another ruthless Tiger Mother, I should be clear about what I am suggesting. I don’t want to emulate the Korean education system. The kids sit in school all day and then spend another four to nine hours studying in private tutoring academies or on their own. Even though Korean kids outperform most of the world in math, reading and science, they do so at an unreasonable cost. Korean kids tend to be miserable in high school, which partly explains their high teenage suicide rate.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from some of Korea’s successes, or from other kinder, gentler nations that still manage to foster more accountability in grading. Take Finland, where kids are not even allowed to receive grades until about age 11, yet good marks in math are far harder to come by than in the U.S. On the same 2003 OECD exam, 56 percent of Finns reported receiving good math grades (16 percentage points fewer than in the U.S.), even as the same Finnish kids ranked No. 1 in the world on the actual math portion of the test.

Our schools have a lot of problems, and many of them have nothing to do with our kids’ motivation. But the shortage of rigor and professionalism among too many American superintendents, principals and teachers trickles down to the students, where not enough is expected of our kids – for all kinds of reasons.

At this moment in history, America is engaged in a divisive, painful fight to finally improve its schools at scale. To remain competitive in a fast-changing world, we are demanding more from our teachers than we ever have before. We should do the same from our kids – even if it makes them (and us) uncomfortable.

Amanda Ripley is a Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. Her forthcoming book, The Smart Kids Club: How other Countries Saved Their Schools (And Taught Their Kids to Think), will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2012.

*Photo courtesy of sansreproache.

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