Given the task definition and input, reply with output. In this task, you are given a list of integers and an integer k. You need to find the kth smallest element in the input list and return that.

[178, 170, 196, 57, 265, 258, 84, 209, 259, 87, 130, 134, 49, 106, 18, 177, 207, 199, 131, 257], k=12
178