The December issue of The Atlantic magazine brings all of us a timely and important protest over mismanagement of the American elite.
David Brooks’ article is titled “How the Ivy League Broke America.”
Using institutions of higher education to recruit and condition future members of national elites is foundational to modernity.
Napoleon created the Grande Ecoles in France to elevate the French to the heights of Enlightenment reason and excellence. Hegel and Humboldt did the same in Germany. The German model of the university came to the U.S. after our Civil War, starting with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Previously, Oxford and Cambridge had executed the same function of providing specialized social capital creation for Great Britain.
Countries around the world now very much want to send their children to the U.S. for higher education.
But what if the American system of higher education has fallen down on the job? What if its graduates cannot and do not serve the American people well as adult professionals?
This is the question Brooks puts forward in his essay. He insists that there has been a disgraceful failure in American higher education, failings which need to be stopped and replaced with a better system.
What Brooks writes is relevant to every country. Higher education opens the gates of a nation’s capacity to build a moral society, moral capitalism and moral government.
You may read my shortened version of his essay here.