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Notes -
I think there's just more educational stratification in Britain. Upper-class Britons including, to throw out two random examples, Boris Johnson and the actor Tom Hiddleston, still receive a classical education at Eton and Oxbridge which is very verbally-loaded and includes learning Latin and Greek. The comparable tradition in the US died out nearly a century ago (the last American president to know Latin well was apparently Herbert Hoover).
By contrast, the best and brightest Americans today go into STEM fields and receive an education that is very challenging technically, but not so much verbally, at least in my experience (I was genuinely challenged by some of my math, physics, and engineering courses, but writing an essay for a humanities class was always something I could blow off until the last minute and I literally fell asleep during the verbal portion of the SAT and got a perfect score).
An interesting anecdote that might highlight this distinction... I don't know if it's still up-to-date, but I read recently Tom Clancy's Submarine, a overview of modern (in the early 90s) submarines, and one of the points made clear is that the British nuclear submarine officer is a leader first, his training is first and foremost in leadership and then in his specialty, while the American nuclear submarine officer is an engineer first.
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