Vivek Ramaswamy’s much-discussed Christmas X post reflected several questionable assumptions, but it was right to link a cultures highest aspirations and its education. One could be forgiven for watching the children’s movies popular in 1990s America and drawing the conclusion that what we most wanted was a life of ease, security and spontaneity—akin to the self-indulgence of an ancient tyrant. Given the bleak state of our popular culture, the even more dire state of our high culture, and our tendency to project the worst image of both in the world, American conservatives like Ramaswamy are sometimes tempted to look elsewhere for temporal salvation. But he draws a false dichotomy between leisure and productivity that would tend to reproduce the worst features of the stratified technocracy of India’s big cities without alleviating the arrogance that has provoked Middle America to resent the Ivy League. We should take hope from realizing that the American tradition contains resources for a far more full-throated conception of excellence. In fact, our tradition offers the best prospects in the world today for an elite worth having.

　　Comparison can help us understand ourselves. Cultures can be known in microcosm through their peaks, what they put forward as exemplars of the best of themselves for their most talented young people to learn. Three models of elite education from distinct countries that each genuinely offer much for American conservatives to admire illustrate why America remains indispensable. In order of decreasing familiarity, France, Singapore, and my own native country of Malawi have much to teach us about the beauty of excellence, the real value of expertise, and the importance of rootedness. But America offers the best prospect of combining all three of these principles.

　　Education in France: Intellectualism and Stagnation

　　At first glance, the French higher education system looks like a synthesis between American features and those that prevail across continental Europe. The universities as such offer near-universal admission and are therefore extremely variable in student and professor quality; their denizens frequently complain about a lack of funding and talent. The University of Paris system particularly tends to be Corbusian and impersonal, having been dramatically reorganized after the 1968 student riots.

　　But a whole different system exists at the summit of French higher education: the grandes-écoles, where admission is based on national competitive exams. They are tiny compared to the universities (the École Polytechnique has 3,300 students as opposed to 32,000 at the University of Nanterre), highly selective, and they promise employment in the best French companies and especially in the state. These schools stem from the period of the French Revolution and of Napoleon I’s empire, when France, in the crucible of war, sought to replace the old, (often literally) decapitated, titled nobility with a new elite who had proved their personal talent. Even those who go to the technically-oriented grandes-écoles often bring with them a humanistic formation from the classes préparatoires, two years of highly regimented intensive general education after secondary school.

　　This system yields much that is attractive. Intellectualism is cool in France and the truth must shine with beauty; popular magazines are full of literary references and philosophical allusions find their way into everyday speech. Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, recounts an anecdote from the Parisian cafés of his day in which one waiter insulted the other with “You’re such a Cartesian!” More broadly, the prevailing pedagogy grounds students in the commentary tradition, conveying that great texts of the past are significant in large measure because they have so often been read and analyzed before. No diplomé of a grande-école would deny that Aristotle, Rousseau, and Heidegger are important (at least, until very recently; intellectual oikophobia has begun to set in recently, due to its vogue chez nous). But prompt the same person to interpret such an author for himself, to ask whether what he says might be true, and the likely result is great caution.

　　The result at the level of the regime is similar: France’s competent, impressive administrators ostensibly traverse a political spectrum, but they often think alike. This leads to reluctance to build new things or face impending crises. The most perceptive people thinking about education in France therefore admire the American classical-education movement and the Yankee ability to start new schools from scratch.

　　Education in Singapore: Salvation by Merit Alone

　　Singapore in some respects looks like the French system on steroids and compressed into a postage-stamp of land: a demanding, austere regime designed to yield STEM excellence and skilled, incorruptible governors. Singaporean education is even more centralized than French: all teachers are trained in a set curriculum at the National Institute of Education, with their salaries deliberately set by the Ministry of Education to compete with industry in order to attract motivated candidates and make the profession prestigious. Testing to identify objective criteria of excellence and then reward them is the central ethos: elementary schoolers are tested to determine whether they will be fast-tracked into the Gifted Education Programme, and teachers are assessed every year to see if they deserve a bonus. This system has been built up through decades as central to the vision of the People’s Action Party, which has ruled since independence in the 1960s.

　　A new academic semester and a new presidential administration are a good time to think seriously about how American elite education could best be reformed.

　　The crown of the whole system, and its integral connection to the regime, is the civil service. As Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong put it on Singaporean National Day in 2000, setting high civil salaries to attract the best graduates and incentivize them to keep clean of corruption adheres to the teaching of the ancient Confucian philosopher Xun Zi: “From each his best, to each his worth.”

　　Singapore is an impressive place, and it has achieved much in a short time. But it is also a very particular case and difficult to replicate: the prestige of its civil service depends greatly on the combination of ancient Confucian tradition brought by the majority-Chinese settlers of Singapore in the nineteenth century, and the legacy of British colonial rule, which legitimated itself by its intolerance for corruption.

　　Singapore’s system also comes at a high price: it has become a highly stratified society subject to an arms race in after-school programs, combined with ethnic federation managed by one-party rule. It cannot rely on a broadly prosperous middle-class demos to secure self-government. Michael Young’s parable of an estranged society where IQ testing determines one’s fate, The Rise of the Meritocracy, although written to satirize what he saw postwar Britain becoming, captures a dark side of today’s Singapore. Discontent with the system and the high cost of living in a city-state seems to be brewing, with some critics rejecting the very principle of merit itself.

　　Education in Malawi: The Need for Roots

　　My furthest-afield example comes from the country where I was born, landlocked Malawi, which styles itself “The Warm Heart of Africa,” along the shores of the southernmost of Africa’s Great Lakes. Despite being an agrarian, subsistence economy, Malawi has a tradition of full-throated embrace of classical education and high culture. This stems from a deep and early encounter with the Western classics through missionaries who came to preach the Gospel and end the East African slave trade, which by the mid-nineteenth century when David Livingstone arrived on the scene had turned most of the region into small tribal groups of hunters and hunted. Generations of dedicated missionaries, often Oxbridge graduates from the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, at once pioneers, translators, and teachers, followed him. They brought not just the Bible, but literacy, and with it, the best theology, philosophy, literature, and history that they knew.

　　In many ways, Dr. Kamuzu Hastings Banda, the founding father and first president of Malawi, a student of missionaries who went on to study in America and Britain, drank more deeply from the taproots of Western wisdom than the Britons and Americans who spent so much of the twentieth century forgetting their inheritance. As Malawi was gaining independence, he quipped to the outgoing colonial administrators to remember that, at the time of Hadrian, “You were under Roman management!” He meant that civilization is learned and earned, not innate, and that just as once Western Europe had risen from Roman tutelage to self-government through the labors of Augustine, Alcuin, and Alfred to transmit the learning of Greece and Rome, Africa could and must do likewise. To that end, he dedicated half of the national education budget to send the brightest Malawians free of charge to Kamuzu Academy, “The Eton of Africa,” where they were steeped in Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and Virgil.

　　While Kamuzu Academy has achieved much—not least, cultivating a Malawian literary and poetic tradition that few other countries on the continent can rival—to adapt and transplant the best of the West would require the West to profess its own traditions. Alexander Chula’s excellent book on Banda and the missionaries’ educational legacy recounts a depressing anecdote that sums up much. As the author, himself a classics teacher at Kamuzu Academy, stood in the Anglican Cathedral of Zanzibar, erected on the site of the slave market that the Royal Navy razed when taking over the sultanate, a British tourist commented, “Boring. Slavery was created by us.” Similarly, perverse dynamics are regularly in play at the United Nations: when Malawi chaired the UN Commission on the Status of Women, European delegates lectured the horrified Malawians, who believed in chastity, on how abortion access was essential to women’s advancement.

　　Education in America: Prospects for Renewal

　　A new presidential administration is a good time to think seriously about how American elite education could best be reformed. That requires building on the virtues of our starting position. Unlike France, Singapore, or Malawi, American colleges have residential campuses, where students live and study in the same place and associate thickly, creating a rich panoply of debating societies, sports teams, campus newspapers, and much more. Membership in these bodies forms the whole person, making college education far more than the downloading of data. This associational life has been recognized as an American distinctive for more than a century in classics like Stover at Yale that celebrate the scholar-athlete, helping prevent our higher-educational ideal from reducing to mere meritocracy. Whereas “merit” implies testable, quantifiable intellectual potential and therefore tends to yield a narrow conception of knowledge as power, the American college keeps alive a more classical understanding of intellectual life as conformed to right reason and oriented towards our familial, civic, and religious duties. Americans are rightly more inclined to call Frederick Douglass great than Anthony Fauci.

　　We should build on this implicit wisdom to make college more about content and character, from admissions to alumni associations. We need a renewed dedication to excellence, but that can’t be defined narrowly by GPA or test scores. Entrance exams could require real knowledge of texts, rather than mere transferrable skills—one of the key differences between the established SAT and its challengers like the Classical Learning Test. Renewed language requirements could incentivize a renaissance of Latin and Greek study. Most of all, curricula need to be reformed to nourish due reverence for the Western and American inheritance. This will help ensure that common loves link our educated elites with their fellow citizens so that they can follow in the footsteps of the great masters of English rhetoric like Lincoln, Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr., men who could command literary heights but speak to the hearts of ordinary people.