Somewhere between soccer practice and university prep, your teenager is working on something you’ve been striving to support them with: growth. The kind that happens when a 16-year-old stands at the foot of the Colosseum, journal in hand, earning a high school English credit, and realizes for the first time that the world is not something to read about, it's something to live in. MEI Academy has been helping students learn about the world and how to live in it for over 25 years, and GoOverseas has become the trusted source that ensures families like yours find us.
Six corporations control 90% of what you consume as news. Your favourite podcast guest has a consulting contract. Your outrage is real — the target was just selected for you.
Imagine you survived the unsurvivable. And then imagine the man who helped make it happen moves back in three doors down. Now consider the ratio of three convictions to 1.7 million dead. Someone decided that was “enough”.
A 1975 funk song, a game theory algorithm, and a Cambodian genocide walk into a blog — and somehow they're all talking about your Tuesday. Conflict is inevitable. Combat, it turns out, is entirely optional. You've just never been taught the difference.
Your friend group has borders, buffer zones, proxy wars, and peace treaties nobody signed — and you built all of it without a single meeting. Turns out the same “game theory” trapping nations in endless conflict is also running your group chat at 11 p.m. The scary part? You already know how to end it. The question is who moves first.
You’ve done the sunrise, the selfies with lotus flowers, the kids climbing worn stone steps like it’s an ancient jungle gym. Now the teacher is talking about Tuol Sleng and the killing fields, and the air suddenly feels heavier than the humidity, and that is saying something.
You’ve blocked people, sure—but have you ever noticed how much work it takes to keep them out of your head? The same instincts that build tiny emotional walls in our group chats and family texts are the ones redrawing borders, creating refugees, and keeping whole nations locked in conflict. This piece won’t tell you to “be nicer”; it’s going to ask a far more uncomfortable question: what if the way we fight in our kitchens is quietly teaching our kids how the world decides who belongs—and who doesn’t?
You don’t usually think about “religion” when you’re doom‑scrolling real estate listings and paying $7 for a latte frapaccino, no whip, half froth, with oat milk. But Angkor Wat, 9/11, and the towers of lower Manhattan are all quietly whispering the same question: what happens to an empire when its gods get replaced, but the buildings go right back up or are otherwise still there? But, more importantly, what do your “towers” say about the gods you actually serve, not the ones you claim to believe in?
Remember the telephone game? Start with a message and see how it is changed, misinterpreted and then by the end has a vague resemblance to what started the game? The telephone game actually teaches that distortion isn't a bug; it's a feature. Sometimes a new interpretation comes with an advancement on education, consequence and experience. In history, there were times when a redesign of "the story" of a people was necessary to refine a moral code, rein in chaos and work toward a better, safer and more just “tomorrow”. Examples of this would be basically EVERY culture that used to sacrifice and butcher animals and humans to appease the gods.
