Head Hand Heart by David Goodhart review – does getting a degree matter too much?
David Goodhart has been on the winning side of successive ideological battles over the last 25 years. As founder of Prospect magazine in 1995, he correctly sensed an emerging Blairite zeitgeist that built policy innovation on the “big ideas” of ambitious Anglo-American intellectuals. His controversial 2004 essay, “Too Diverse?”, which challenged liberal orthodoxies surrounding immigration, appeared heterodox (not to mention menacing) to many of his readers and associates, but foreshadowed a decade in which anti-immigration sentiments and Nigel Farage moved steadily towards the mainstream of British politics.
His 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, which coined the catchy binary of liberal “anywheres” and traditionalist “somewheres”, captured Theresa May’s stated ideological project of a new working-class conservatism, later discernible in Boris Johnson’s 2019 election triumph. And now, Head Hand Heart arrives to throw doubt on the shibboleths of the “knowledge-based” economy and the importance of graduates in society, just as the government has made clear it wants fewer people going to university, and as Covid-19 threatens a major financial crisis for higher education.
The book was mostly written long before the health crisis, and Goodhart pleads “guilty to Covid confirmation bias – the tendency to see your own assumptions about how the world should evolve confirmed by the pandemic”. To the extent that “essential workers” and NHS staff were extolled over the spring of 2020, while many “knowledge workers” sat at home on Zoom, his central argument – that we have paid insufficient respect to manual and care-based work – stands up well under the circumstances. And while there is no evidence of schadenfreude for the predicament that universities now find themselves in, Goodhart and his publishers may reflect on the freakishly good fortune of the book’s timing.
Goodhart describes himself here as a “social democrat”, and the premise of Head Hand Heart is one that many on the left will sympathise with. Like Thomas Piketty, he is concerned by how the graduate/non-graduate divide has become the central basis of inequality in liberal democracies, while politics becomes a game played by and for knowledge elites. Like David Graeber, he is alert to how a surfeit of reliance on qualifications and bureaucracy has led to unnecessary labour. At the core of Head Hand Heart is one of the central problems of communitarian philosophy: how to distribute the social conditions of esteem and self-esteem more equally.
Head Hand Heart expends more time and effort on dismantling the existing hierarchy of esteem than it does on constructing a new one. The problem facing societies such as Britain’s, Goodhart argues, is that they have become in thrall to a single metric of achievement – academic tests. Economic success, self-respect, political representation and wellbeing are all tied to performance in a single sphere of human endeavour, that of abstract reasoning and knowledge processing. Other forms of human ability (tagged as “Hand” and “Heart”) become afterthoughts, either left to those who have failed academically, or to be fitted in around cognitive work.
Degrees once signalled exceptional cognitive ability, but as they become the norm they lose this distinguishing function
This is not a recent or sudden development (nor is it a new critique), but one that has been creeping up on us since the birth of merit-based recruitment practices and modern universities in the 19th century. But it has accelerated since the 1960s, in tandem with deindustrialisation and the expansion of higher education, and tipped even further towards “Head” skills with the 1992 conversion of polytechnics into universities. Encouraged by New Labour, educators became focused on funnelling children via specialist A-levels into universities, and 40% of job openings now demand a degree. Goodhart finds this growing “graduatisation” especially regrettable, nowhere more so than in nursing, a profession he discusses in some depth.
The downsides of this situation are various and growing worse. Degrees once “signalled” exceptional cognitive ability, or at least cultural privilege, but as they become the norm they lose this distinguishing function. More people end up taking postgraduate qualifications in their effort to stand out, a compulsive rat-race that does little to prepare people for the reality of work or give them any real autonomy. As the number of graduates has risen, the economic premium attached to a degree has fallen, and the looming threat of automation (the “fourth industrial revolution”) looks set to shrink the demand for “Head” skills in the workplace.
The problem, as many recent policymakers and politicians have stressed, is the shortage of alternative routes to a fulfilling, secure and praiseworthy career path. Unlike some of its European neighbours, Britain has ended up using its traditional standard for entry to the elite as a universal standard of human worth. What other standards are there? This is where Goodhart takes a sharply conservative turn, and where he will lose the sympathies of liberal and especially feminist readers. The alternative benchmarks for appraising human conduct aren’t there to be invented so much as restored.
The fallout of the inexorable rise of “Head” since the 60s has been witnessed in a crisis of family life, he argues, as men and women are both sucked into the vortex of graduatisation and the search for degendered status. At his more melancholic, Goodhart presents this as a wholesale crisis of meaning. He admits late on in the book that “Head, Hand and Heart” are not intrinsically “distinct domains”, but clearly believes that enthusiasm for the knowledge worker has obscured the symbolic differentiation of manual work and care work, that once mapped on to identifiable gender roles, inside and outside the home. His preoccupation with modern nursing testifies to this discomfort, while his prescriptions for alleviating the current care crisis all relate back to a strengthening of the traditional family, including some reassertion of the “breadwinner” role that conferred esteem on men in the past.
Like much of Goodhart’s output since that 2004 essay, Head Hand Heart is partly about Goodhart. He has spoken in the past of being ostracised by his north London liberal friends (he was either exaggerating or made a whole new set: Head Hand Heart is littered with anecdotes about his friends’ and their children’s experiences, especially their career accidents and lucky escapes from the clutches of universities). Despite being the intellectual voice of the “somewheres” against the “anywheres”, the cultural reference points and stories are all far more befitting the metropolitan founder of Prospect magazine than some dewy-eyed cultural romantic. Yet the conclusions are more Roger Scruton than Andrew Adonis. Head Hand Heart reflects the author’s own journey as much as Britain’s.
It is to Goodhart’s credit that he doesn’t resort to the tedious cliches regarding the “wokeness” of contemporary academia that are now a favoured attack-line for conservative newspapers and politicians. Nor does he even accuse universities of doing a bad job. His argument is more structural than that. Even so, by challenging the cultural power of higher education (and questioning its economic benefits) he is pushing at an open political door. Thanks to a thorny (and frankly unnecessary) tour through research on the nature of intelligence, Head Hand Heart does just enough to keep any eugenically curious political strategists in Downing Street interested.
Head Hand Heart’s deeper significance for conservatism lies in how it joins the dots of Britain’s current cultural and economic malaises. Goodhart is impassioned and hopeful, but the underlying ideological message is stark: the post-1945 era of rising prosperity and collective flourishing via greater education for all is over. He may well be right that the liberal vision of the knowledge economy has hit the buffers. But many people, especially younger generations, will need a lot more than this book before they see shrinking cultural horizons as something to celebrate.
• William Davies’s This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain is published this month by Verso. Head Hand Heart by David Goodhart is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
