Lila Mandela CP#5

I met up with Ricardo and Bruna in the Suwannee room on Friday, July 19^th. The Suwannee room is a really nice on-campus cafeteria. At first, I think Ricardo was surprised that I was so impressed with Suwannee. He probably assumed that I was an FSU student. I then had to tell him that I recently graduated from FAMU and that our main cafeteria isn’t as lush and warm as the one we were in. Once Bruna arrived, I asked both of them about the education systems of their home countries. I found it interesting that they didn’t have an equivalent to Advanced Placement classes. AP courses were awesome to me because they gave me a chance to really challenge myself academically, and if I passed the exam, I had one less class to worry about in college (that how I got out of English). Bruna told me that in Brazil, everyone takes on the same set of subjects until high school, where they concentrate on a certain discipline like physics or fine arts or writing. Afterward, there’s this huge entrance exam for high school graduates that determines which college you attend and since all public college education is fully funded by the government, that high school exam score is extremely important to Brazilian students. Everyone wants a high score to get into the best school because everyone can afford free tuition. Ricardo told me that in Chile, the private schools are actually worse than the public schools because the private schools only focus is profit and not education. I definitely like the idea of free tuition in Brazil and Chile. It would be nice if we had the same structure in the United States. More students would have access to a college education without thousands of dollars of student loan debt after graduation. I think much can be learned about different countries’ education systems if we’re willing to listen.