"One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”"
This is not just a Brazilian problem. Much of the university education in the US is the same. Very few students ask questions and consider question asking to be a waste of time.
Rote memorization just to pass tests is sadly all too prevalent in US universities as well.