I'm Hungarian. Due to my parents, I attended schools in 3 different countries:

- first half year : Hungary

- grades 1.5 - 4 : Germany

- grades 5 - 8 : Hungary

- grades 9 - 12 : USA, California

- Universities, PhD: Hungary

After the first half year in Hungary, when I arrived in Germany, I was waaay ahead of all the other kids in Math & Sciences and was near the top of the class for most of the 4 years without speaking the language properly.

Then I got back to Hungary, where I had major catching up to do, especially in terms of Math, Sciences, Music and of course Hungarian language. I eventually caught up in Math & Physics, but not in Biology or Music, which never interested me much. (I mention Music because Hungarian schools teach music at a high level from grade 1 to everyone according to the "Liszt system", and for someone like me, who is not musically minded it was impossible to catch up.)

Then I went to University High School in Irvine, Orange County, California, one of the best public high schools in the USA I believe. Even so, that was a fairly shocking experience for me. Initially I was way ahead, but the whole system was so different, neither I not my parents knew how it worked (eg. you have to pick your own classes), the advisors put me into idiotic "English as a Second Language" classes for the first few months, where you really can't actually learn English because all the other kids are Korean. And for some reason they only had ESL for low-level math classes, roughly at the level you'd learn in 6th grade everywhere else. So eventually I did okay at UHS, because we figured out to ignore what the advisors (who seemed completely useless to me) say. But I couldn't really cope with all the freedom, all the activities, or the fact that everybody had cars at age 16, and I didn't, so I got Bs regularly.

Then I got back to a Hungarian University for a CS major, and even though I took all the AP classes in the US and took some CS at the local community college and UCI, I was waaaaaaaaaay behind, esp. in Physics. The AP Calculus classes are not so bad, but the one year AP Physics class is a major joke. In Hungary they study Physics for 4 years straight. So at first I had really bad grades at University. Eventually I went on to do a 2nd degree (another 5 manyears) in Physics, mostly because it interested me and I was so annoyed by my lack of understanding.

Overall, it's clear that the US public HS, even one of the best, was a major waste of time. I didn't learn much, nor were the teachers any good. I eventually enrolled to become a physicist to properly repair the "damage" caused by a lack of proper Physics education at the HS. It quickly turned out I'm so interested in Physical theories that I'm currently doing a PhD.

I'm also fairly certain that I got a better University education here in Hungary (esp. Physics) than I would have gotten at a public University in the US, all things taken into account. However, it's clear that no University in any part of the world can compete with top US and UK schools (mostly private and some public like Berkeley).

Overall, I'm still very happy to have spent 4 years in the USA, as it was a major life experience, and I benefit from it every day. I would say it was worth it even though the HS sucked, because the US culture / language is like Rome was 2000 years ago. The United States is the center of the world, and if somebody doesn't understand the United States, they don't understand the world. To get a better feeling for the "center of the world" part, visit the NASA museum in Washington. Everything worth mentioning that has happened after 1940 is there.

Also, the preview of this film seems to discount the self-confidence issue. I can understand this, but the makers should visit a country where kids, and thus people, are not injected with such self-confidence and see how they're doing (like here in Hungary). US self-confidence is one of the major factors why the economy is so great and why you have so many startups. I'm doing a startup right now, and it's no question that it's because after having spent 4 years in California I have a "can do" attitude, completely off the charts compared to my peers here in Hungary. I remember when I was at Uni I overheard someone referring to me as the "American guy" and I asked him how he knew I spent time in the States: he replied he didn't, he just gave me that nickname based on my attitude.