Exporting Anxiety Worldwide: How Success Academy Became McMeritocracy for the Globe

Success Academy: The Global Franchise of Making Children Cry on Five Continents

By the time the Finnish delegation landed in New York to tour Success Academy, the charter chain had already franchised its trademark blend of militaristic joy and pedagogical Stockholm Syndrome to Lagos, Dubai, and a start-up incubator in Tallinn that still smells of birch tar and venture capital. What began as Eva Moskowitz’s modest experiment in turning Harlem kindergarteners into Ivy-bound data points has metastasized into a planetary movement—proof that the free market can privatize anxiety as elegantly as it privatizes water.

From Singapore to São Paulo, education ministries suffering chronic shortages of both teachers and self-esteem now import the SA play-book: silent hallways, color-coded silence, and the subtle art of making seven-year-olds pee on schedule. The appeal is obvious. Success Academy delivers the one commodity every anxious middle-class parent on Earth wants—certainty—packaged with the moral cover of “closing the achievement gap.” Never mind that the gap is less a canyon to be bridged than a moat to keep the riffraff from the pool. The brand sells because, in an era of climate collapse and algorithmic precarity, a neatly stacked bar graph still feels like destiny.

The international rollout has been predictably slapstick. In Seoul, rigid Confucian hierarchies collided with Success’s zero-tolerance policy on eye contact below the chin; the compromise was to let students blink only during designated Blink Breaks. In Lagos, power cuts turned the vaunted “Slant” posture into an avant-garde yoga pose. Meanwhile, in Dubai, Emirati parents complained that the school’s obsession with college admissions neglected falconry grades. Each culture discovers its own comedic subplot, yet the core remains intact: a conviction that children are essentially faulty hard drives that must be reformatted into Ivy League Wi-Fi.

Western Europe, ever allergic to American optimism, has watched the spectacle with the same horror usually reserved for deep-fried butter. German newspapers ran exposés titled “Schulen ohne Seele,” illustrated with photos of six-year-olds marching in perfect rows like a Wehrmacht flash-mob. French intellectuals penned 3,000-word essays arguing that Success Academy is late-stage capitalism’s final joke: a factory that produces both the managerial class and the existential void it will spend adulthood medicating. Only the British, nostalgic for empire and standardized cruelty, have expressed polite interest—provided the uniforms include boaters.

What makes Success Academy globally significant is not its test scores—those can be gamed by any regime willing to expel low performers faster than a TikTok trend dies—but its replicable ideology. It exports the peculiar American belief that inequality can be solved by giving poor kids the same neurotic striving that made rich kids insufferable at Exeter. The world already has McDonald’s; now it has McMeritocracy, supersized.

The darker punchline, visible from Nairobi to New Glasgow, is that Success Academy’s model thrives precisely where public systems are being starved into organ-donor status. Governments that once funded libraries now pay licensing fees for “scholarly habits” flashcards. The chain’s expansion map overlays neatly with World Bank austerity programs—an accidental cartography of who’s given up on the common good.

And still, parents line up. In Athens, where youth unemployment hovers around thirty percent, mothers camp outside the newest Success outpost clutching laminated copies of last year’s Stanford admissions list like indulgences. In Jakarta, fathers trade tips on which cram center best replicates SA’s “joyful rigor,” a phrase that sounds ever more Orwellian when translated into Bahasa. Everywhere, the promise is identical: we will turn your child into a vector of upward mobility, collateral damage to childhood be damned.

The planet keeps warming, democracies keep wobbling, but at least little Arjun in Mumbai can recite the quadratic formula in his sleep. That, apparently, counts as hope. And so Success Academy marches on—flagship of a new empire built not on oil or opium but on the humble Scantron. If the arc of history bends toward justice, it now comes with a silent transition procedure and bathroom passes strictly limited to three per semester.