A Brit's Experience of Secondary School in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

Usually when people think of Brazil, two cities come to mind: Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. And why wouldn’t they? The iconic statue of Christ the Redeemer, looking out over the spectacular natural beauty of Rio, is one of the seven wonders of the world. São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, houses almost 12 million people and is the country’s economic engine. But a city that is argued to possess the heart of Brazil is often overlooked when we think of Brazil’s future and what it means to be Brazilian.

The city I am talking about is Salvador, in the state of Bahia. As Brazil’s first capital city and one of the central ports of its transatlantic slave trade, its past represents both the nation’s dreams of sovereign prosperity and the dark colonial roots that still have a grip on Brazil’s potential as ‘the country of the future’. But it is from these same roots that Afro-Brazilian cultural riches such as the religion of Candomblé, the martial art of Capoeira, and the world-renowned cultural group, Olodum, have emerged and imprinted a distinctive look and feel on this all-singing, all-dancing, high-vibration city.

Yet, at the age of 12 when I moved there, I knew none of this. All I knew was that if I left all my friends behind in England and moved halfway across the world to join a Brazilian secondary school, my mum promised me I could get a puppy…

The fear of starting again

I remember my first day at the school in Salvador vividly. I was extremely shy and withdrawn after my experience of secondary school in the UK and all I could think about as I got nearer to the school was what kind of nightmare I was about to step into. As I recalled my memories of school back in England, I thought about how when a new kid first entered the classroom we would all be made to sit in silence as the teacher introduced them. Everyone would stare as they walked to their seat. It always felt tense, and I could only imagine how stressful it was to go through. For children coming from different countries the experience was often worse as they could be outcast for not speaking English or picked on for their cultural differences.

Nothing but these memories were running through my mind as I approached my new classroom. Would they stare at me? Would they laugh? I was almost certain I was about to have an even worse schooling experience than in England. I spoke no Portuguese and didn’t know how to fit in with different groups of people my age or stand up for myself. I had no idea how I was going to get through the next year.

A Brazilian baptism of fire

Yet rather than a tense silence, when the door opened and I stepped inside the class erupted into a noisy chaos as the kids got out of their seats to crowd me. I could barely hear myself talk as they all either eagerly introduced themselves or tried to get me to swear in Portuguese, all while the teacher sat back and allowed the class to exhaust itself before shooing them back to their seats and introducing herself to me by her first name. As chaotic as this sounds, the fact that I was thrown right into the social setting meant that I had connected with the entire class straight away and had no time or space to worry about what anyone was thinking of me.

From then on, I rode the daily Brazilian classroom experience like a wave. Every day was so varied, despite the class group and classroom never changing. Instead of a strict seating plan, we could sit wherever we wanted to as long as we respected other students and teachers. We could call teachers by their first names, and they would join us at our desks during class discussions. If we were working well, we were sometimes allowed to listen to music and use our phones discreetly or chat to others. I couldn’t believe how much this fluidity differed from the rigorous rules governing my school days back in England.

But what shocked me the most was the drama of it all. Apparently, according to my mum, I came home one day after school and said, “mum there were these boys fighting on the floor and the teacher did nothing!” Class scuffles were not an uncommon event of the school day, but far from being violent they were emotionally productive. Disagreements between students were loud and direct, and I witnessed a spectrum of negative emotion from irritation to frustration, to jealousy and upset, being openly expressed. These didn’t just include outright arguments, but small physical gestures and emotional verbal spats that resolved minor disagreements before they ever turned into something hostile. Children were always guided towards using dialogue for expression, but the physicality of childhood was not completely suppressed, and playful fights were not harshly punished.

Rather than act as a strict figure of authority in situations of conflict, the teacher would generally undertake a more mediatory role, helping the students to practice the tools necessary to resolve conflict directly while still being respectful to one another.

A very different system

This experience was totally baffling to me but also fascinating, and it later made me question what exactly had caused me to shut down so much during my secondary school experience back in the UK. Looking back, I realised something: During my years at primary school, which spans from the ages of 4-11, I was given space to be playful and embrace the emotional messiness of childhood development. I felt secure being with the same class group all year round and thrived in the structured but relaxed school environment. These years were foundational in providing the space for my identity to develop naturally.

When I began secondary school at age 11, however, this environment changed abruptly. I suddenly had to adapt to multiple different classrooms and teachers with varying expectations, strict uniform rules and behaviour systems. If we made simple mistakes like forgetting something to class, or expressing ourselves too loudly, or wearing our uniform the wrong way, we were disciplined and sometimes publicly shamed. Disagreements between students were often quickly shut down by teachers, who moved them physically apart to avoid further conflict.

This stricter, rules-based setting had the intention of encouraging responsibility and ensuring an environment of respect to help prepare children for adulthood, but in practice it produced a number of unintended consequences.

Without the chance to resolve disputes as they arose, some children suppressed negative emotion in the moment to avoid discipline but diverted it outwards through other, more covert and hostile, channels like social exclusion or towards children who stood out as vulnerable. Over time, this seemed to shape a social setting where shyness, difference, and emotionality made you a target, but the ability to mask negative emotion and project confidence brought you status. For other children this environment appeared to produce so much emotional repression that they began to consistently rebel against authority. By the time I returned to the UK and rejoined the school aged 15, it wasn’t uncommon to see kids throwing things at the teacher every time they weren’t looking or taunting them so much that the teachers themselves would have emotional meltdowns in front of the class.

As I adapted to this new environment, I began to fixate on my behaviour and eventually reached a state where I was constantly self-analysing and worrying about ‘getting it wrong’. I had learnt to mute my childlike nature and, in the end, while the UK secondary school setting had successfully taught me manners and discipline, it had also caused me to mould my every move around a strict set of social rules and behaviours, shaping my internal narrative before I’d had the chance to finish developing a sense of who I was.

A space to be yourself

In Salvador, my school environment was completely different. Children were allowed to express themselves in ways that would be disciplined in England. This even extended to visual self-expression: I remember one of my friends had dyed his hair a mixture of pink and green and wore earrings, and not only did the teacher permit it, but none of the children cared. Others expressed themselves in different ways, like one of my classmates who would sometimes bring in his guitar to class to play at the end of the day. Different social groups intermingled in the classroom, and there wasn’t an obvious sense of hierarchy.

While the teachers did discipline the students, they also respected their self-expression, and by doing so cultivated a relaxed social environment of mutual respect, where we valued each other’s individuality. A good chunk of the school day was spent engaging in communal rows and jokes and yet, the children overall did exceptionally well in their studies. They were learning a level of algebra more than a year in advance of the students at my secondary school back in the UK.

What I learnt about expressing emotion

As I’ve grown older and gained more experience both in Britain and Brazil, I’ve come to understand the effects that these differing school structures may promote. In Britain, we can often struggle to directly communicate upset with other people because many of us never learnt how to be openly emotional at someone in adulthood and instead developed codes of language to confront each other as indirectly as possible. When we do express negative emotion to each other, it is often very difficult because we don’t know how to do it, and the recipient person doesn’t know how to receive it so they can get very upset. In this sense, we never learnt how to act in the middle ground. We are so indirect that we often miss what the person is trying to communicate; they can’t actually say it out loud because they’ve learnt to build a system that doesn’t let them. My experience in Salvador has allowed me to see how this fundamental skill in communication may be cultivated or lost in the secondary school environment - the transition period between childhood and adulthood. In the Bahian classroom, I had the chance to observe how the space of this middle ground can be played out productively. The Brazilian classroom I experienced was child-centred and provided more time and space for children to grow up naturally. It was massively dramatic, and much less stressful.

An opportunity for both education systems

Bahians are known to be particularly loud and expressive, but they are experts in communicating their mind. I see this reflected in Brazil as a whole. But in the so-called heart of Brazil, these characteristics beat more passionately.

In some parts of Brazil, there is a tendency to look towards European countries or the United States for models of how to deliver education more effectively, yet I believe these same countries could themselves learn a lot from the way Bahians express emotion with each other productively, just as I did. It was a transformative experience to learn that it was okay for me to be emotionally expressive and allow my unique identity to take shape. Nothing awful was going to happen, and what I realised at the end was that whatever therapeutic experience I had in England, nothing had the same effect as knowing I could express negative emotion with others and the world wouldn’t end.

In 2026, Brazil still faces profound educational inequalities and my experience, of course, was not universal. The Brazilian school I went to was, in fact, a private school - a popular choice in Brazil, but not necessarily because families can afford it. With highly uneven implementations of public-schooling systems and a shortage of investment in deprived areas, obtaining government-funded scholarships or paying upfront for private schooling is often the only way for families to guarantee good opportunities for their children.

Despite some of the negativities I faced in the public UK school setting, that same free schooling gave me the educational foundation that enabled me to reach a top university like King’s. And having since worked as a teaching assistant at a secondary school in England, I have come to deeply value the strong support systems developed by many British schools to ease the fallout of some of these structural issues. Yet my time in the Salvador school setting revealed something insightful about the way we structure the educational environment itself.

As Brazil and the UK mark 200 years of diplomatic relations and exchange cultural riches during the 2026 UK-Brazil Season of Culture, perhaps there is space for reflection on what our secondary school systems could learn from each other, given the similarities we share. This includes re-examining the way we address emotional expression in the classroom, and how it could cultivate a stronger foundation of resilience and collective belonging within this important developmental space.

For me, my time in Salvador is the happiest time of my life to date and has shaped the way I see the world. It led me to engage more deeply with Brazil and sparked a desire to better understand its place within our changing global landscape, something I have been able to do as part of the Global Affairs MSc here at King’s College London. I am forever grateful for the riches that Bahia and Brazil have given me and continue to provide me with. And yes - the puppy’s name was Tilly.