Introduction

I don’t think I introduced myself in my last post. I’m a 14-year-old teenager from Brazil, and I wanted to write down some thoughts I’ve had about politics — and just some thoughts I’ve had about the world. In particular, my experience with “gringos” (mostly Americans), their school system compared to ours, and how interacting with and discovering the Anglophonic side of the internet changed my entire worldview.

I’ve always heard adults make remarks like: “This country is doomed forever!” or “We’re not nearly as civilized as America!” or even “Our educational system is a mess! I wish I could study in the United States.” Those remarks made me picture the United States as one of the most advanced developed countries, and mine as doomed to forever be an undeveloped hellhole.

This began to change when I started interacting with the Anglosphere on the web, learning English in the process. Eventually, I downloaded apps like Discord and Reddit and began interacting and learning more about their culture. But I was pretty young, so I didn’t really focus on that. Since last year, though, I’ve been increasingly bothered by their culture, which I started learning more about as I got a friend group on Discord with mostly Americans and Western Europeans.

How I Became the 🤓

Since the beginning of March this year, an unexpected cultural jolt hit me hard. My friend group — originally formed through Nintendo Homebrew shenanigans — started to evolve. We gradually drifted away from tech talk and began sharing more about our personal lives. At the same time, I was undergoing a major shift myself: I started getting deeply interested in books, philosophy, politics, MUNs, and history — things outside the standard school curriculum. This is pretty normal for someone entering high school, as you begin making decisions that can shape your future. But to my surprise, that shift started to upset them. Whenever I brought up anything related to reading, studying, or politics, I was hit with the classic 🤓 — not offensive in itself, but what followed was.

Overfunded, Undereducated — The Contradiction of the American School

When I brought up school, they usually shared their own experiences too. Not only that, but I also began to stumble upon — and be constantly fed by — content about American education during my daily doomscrolling sessions.

The biggest contradiction to me was their entire vision of school: why they were there, what they thought of their teachers, staff, and the institution as a whole. They seemed to see school not as a space for learning or development, but as a burdensome, bureaucratic hurdle — just something to endure in order to eventually get into college. They don’t see teachers as anything more than servants who are there purely to do their job — meanwhile here, we call them “Uncle/Auntie” as if they were part of our family, and we treat the ones we like as friends and sometimes even add them and talk to them on Insta — and they call that weird or even pedophilic.

Some of them, directly or indirectly, despise their school staff and do acts of vandalism that I simply cannot comprehend — for example, the F Student trend, which consists of teenagers either burning their school laptops or shoving them down a toilet. Meanwhile, even in private schools here, it’s rare to see schools that give laptops to kids, and it’s simply nonexistent in public ones. Not to mention the hassle that their janitors go through while cleaning that kind of mess — which can even be hazardous. Their daily job already seems really difficult when I hear how they leave their classrooms and food courts.

This all sums up to: how can you hate school when your school looks like a college campus? Brazil spends approximately $4,306 yearly per full-time student, but even elite private high schools cost around $7,000 yearly per student, compared to the $11,000 that OECD countries spend on average — and the $15,591 that the U.S. spends on average. However, even considering the reality of public schools, it seems like we have a way more advanced curriculum than the U.S. Our SAT equivalent, the ENEM, doesn’t allow the use of calculators or any kind of aid during the test, yet it has much harder questions. It expects not only operational fluency, but contextual interpretation, abstraction, and problem-solving — even if wrapped in wordy, socially-relevant questions. In the ENEM, you might find a question that requires manipulating complex numbers, understanding the imaginary unit i, or even applying it to a real-world context like electrical engineering or waves. In the SAT? You’re more likely to be penalized for even attempting to use i unless the question specifically tells you it’s allowed. And even then, the scope is laughably basic — usually limited to “What is i²?” or “Simplify (2 + 3i)(1 − i).” Things that basically any mediocre 10th grader in Brazil could answer. I learned the basics of square roots in 5th grade and learned how to solve any by factoring in 8th; meanwhile, if they aren’t “math wizards,” they couldn’t figure out the cube root of 64 without a calculator if their life depended on it.

I’m not even going to scratch the surface on linguistics, humanities, or natural sciences, because the contrast becomes even more absurd. While my country constantly devalues education through underfunding, it still manages to uphold a curriculum that treats these areas as essential to forming a citizen — not just a worker. Meanwhile, many of the people I’ve met online see these fields as useless unless they provide immediate financial return. Their schools often treat subjects like history, philosophy, sociology, or even environmental science as electives or filler. Sometimes, even teachers actively discourage deeper engagement, pushing students to focus only on what’ll be on standardized tests. It’s a culture where the only kind of knowledge worth pursuing is the one that yields capital — and where not knowing becomes almost a point of pride.

How can you cultivate critical thinking in a place where asking questions is seen as being “too political”?

Reading is Suspicious, and Politics is a Symptom

The moment I really realised how deep the cultural canyon ran was when I mentioned I was reading for fun. It wasn’t even a complex book by Dostoevsky or Kafka — just some guy who became paraplegic because he fractured his spine by diving into a lake and wrote a book about it while high on THC — suddenly I’m being called the “nerd,” the “try-hard,” the “pseudo-intellectual.” I wasn’t even trying to show off — I was trying to connect. I’m not going to lie and say reading is common here, because it’s not — however, the core difference is that no one despises it or despises the people who read. They admire them.

For most of them, books were a thing of the past, or a thing you were forced to pretend to care about for school essays. Reading for leisure was strange, and worse: reading political theory? Dangerous. When I started talking more seriously about politics — not even anything radical — I was labelled paranoid, brainwashed, or “too young to have opinions.” In their world, caring is suspicious. Thinking critically is overstepping. And talking politics, especially outside the approved script of “Democrats = good, Republicans = evil,” is treated like raging schizophrenia and equated to people who say the earth is flat and 9/11 didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, I come from a country where everyone has an opinion on politics — because we’re forced to. We grow up watching corruption scandals unfold on the evening news, we have our grandparents giving us unintentional sociology lectures at family lunch, and we learn to distrust the system not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s a matter of survival. Our political consciousness isn’t an aesthetic — it’s how we cope. We tend not to be so nihilistic and say “nothing will change” because we saw it change. My mother saw the first time her grandpa, born in the 30s, voted. She remembers the day our constitution was signed, the day people were no longer tortured for having an opinion, and the day being racist and homophobic became a crime.

Am I in the Third World or Are They?

After all this, I often wonder: am I really the one living in a “third world country,” or are they? On paper, the U.S. has an incredible school system and funding that’s higher than the OECD average, which enables school districts to build schools with pools, gigantic multi-sport courts, gyms, updated tech equipment, etc. But what I’ve witnessed is the complete opposite of what that suggests — and not because of their organization or funding; the culprit is the culture. Students who sabotage their own learning out of boredom or rebellion. A culture that shames intellectual curiosity instead of nurturing it. An environment where caring too much or thinking too deeply is mocked or seen as a mental illness.

Not to mention what comes after school — undervalued community college that’s relatively affordable but still costs money, or endless student debt even for public colleges. I think honestly the thing that confused me the most was how I met someone who’s paying way more than any med student in Brazil possibly could in a private college — which by definition should be funded by the taxes they already pay — and they are, in most sane countries. But instead, that money goes to bombing brown children in the Middle East because of oil and endless military lobbying.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, despite the countless flaws in our education system — overcrowded classrooms, violence, lack of funding, outdated or nonexistent materials, and the current attempt by neoliberal state governors to underfund schools and devalue school staff even more — there is still a respect and admiration for knowledge, a respect for teachers, and a shared understanding of the importance of education as a tool for socio-economic change. My mom is the vice-principal of the afternoon period of a public school, and I can guarantee that if any of those kids were given a laptop for school, they would protect it with their lives — same for any kind of public property that’s not usually given to them.

Final Thoughts

I don’t claim to have all the answers. Our education system is deeply flawed — both in public and private schools. It suffers from inequality, prejudice, underfunding, and a near-total neglect of neurodiversity. And yes, our culture has its own contradictions: not everyone is politically engaged, not everyone reads regularly, and not everyone respects teachers or public property. But here’s the crucial difference — we see these problems. We talk about them. They’re not swept under the rug or dismissed as unimportant.

There’s a sense, however faint, that we’re moving forward — through activism, through collective pressure, through small victories in policy and public awareness. We recognize where we’ve failed, and that self-awareness is what makes transformation possible. We may be limping toward a better future, but at least we’re walking.

In contrast, what scares me most about the culture I witnessed isn’t the lack of engagement — it’s the pride in disengagement. The hostility toward curiosity. The glorification of comfort over truth. It’s hard to change what you refuse to admit is broken.