My experience has been that the ceiling is highest in the US but that the floor is significantly higher in a number of other countries. And I say this as someone who chose to leave a Top 10 US uni to do undergrad in the UK and grad in UK/Japan, so I’m not particularly inclined towards the US model.

It's not idiocy. Everything he wrote about education in Brazil, I experienced first hand. Even if what you said is true, curriculum comparisons don't invalidate my experience.

The most demoralizing thing was the phoniness. The pointlessness of it all. Everybody was just going through the motions. The only thing people wanted to know was the exact sequence of steps they had to follow in order to achieve success. Everybody here knows you have to go to school in order to not be a nobody. So everyone goes to school. It barely matters what field they pick, anything will do. The more prestigious the better. People go to these places and they study crap they don't actually care about because it's all just a means to an end.

I was constantly surrounded by people who I felt didn't actually enjoy computers as much as I did. Made me so disillusioned I chose to do something else with my life. I just couldn't bear to be around people like that anymore.

I would point that Paul Graham wrote a similar criticism to US education that Feyman wrote to Brazilian education:

http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html

The problem is real. But it is not something unknown in other countries.

Probably. I don't really know anything about american education so it's not wise for me to comment. I do have this perception that software is suffering from that problem worldwide though. People used to study this stuff because they liked computers, now everyone is learning to code because they want the comfortable rich programmer lifestyle. It just feels soulless to me.

I had the opposite experience, so have that for anecdote as well.