[supongo]

I went to a DoD school from fourth grade until my second semester of 11th grade. After that, we moved to the U.S.

We moved to a good school district in the U.S, so the quality of the education remained the same. The most startling difference in a U.S public school was in how we were viewed by admin.

Compared to DoD schools, administrators in U.S public school system weren't too different from middle management at $corp. We were numbers on a spreadsheet.

A good analogy - U.S school admin acted like the kind of "manager" who judges you by the lines of code you produce and the number of commits you make. DOD school admin were the kind of people who judge you by the impact you made.

DoD schools respected our autonomy - we were treated like humans. Non-DoD schools treated us like cattle.