Head, Hand, Heart by David Goodhart review – let's think practically

When my old school went from grammar to comprehensive in 1972, the headmaster, Frank Brewin, felt he should prepare the ground with the existing cohort of pupils, which included my brother. He warned them not to look down on the new intake from the local secondary modern, saying: “Some people are good with their heads, and some are good with their hands. That’s just the way things are.”

It was, of course, precisely in order to abolish this kind of sheep-and-goats thinking that the comprehensive system was introduced. Informed by a growing understanding of the role of class and circumstance in determining life destinies, progressive policymakers prioritised the role of education in levelling the playing field and allowing greater social mobility. Almost half of school leavers now go on to university or college in Britain, compared with 15% in the 1970s.

In his latest book, Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century, David Goodhart explores what he argues is the dark underside to this sociological revolution, via interviews, anecdotes and an impressive depth of research. Britain and America in particular, he suggests, suffer from a societal condition he describes as “Peak Head”, where cognitive achievement acts as a sorting mechanism in a supposed meritocracy. Along the way, we have devalued both technical, practical abilities (hand), and social and empathetic skills (heart), while alienating and demoralising the people who do the jobs that require them.

Deindustrialisation is a big part of the story. In 1976, Goodhart writes, there were 45,000 steelworkers and 4,000 students in Sheffield. In 2017, 20 years after Tony Blair made a mantra of “education, education, education”, there were 5,000 steelworkers and 60,000 students. A new common sense urges getting a degree as a passport into a world now dominated by cognitive work, much of it performed in booming city-hubs.

One of the results of this profound cultural shift has been a stagnation in pay and a demoralising loss of status for jobs not deemed to be part of the graduate “knowledge economy”. The hourly pay of bus and coach drivers has risen by just 22% since 1975, compared with a 111% rise for advertising and public relations managers.

“Can we really argue that the work of a junior account manager in a City PR firm is more useful than a bus driver or an adult care worker?” asks Goodhart. Or, indeed, more skilled? One of the best passages in the book describes the many calculations made instantaneously by a bus driver in the single action of moving away from a stop. The scandalously wrong-headed classification of social care as low-skilled work is also skewered. Goodhart quotes Camilla Cavendish, author of a government review on care work, on the belittling of non-graduate care assistants: “The term ‘basic care’ dramatically understates the work of this group. Helping an elderly person to eat and swallow, bathing someone with dignity, communicating with someone with early onset dementia; doing these things with intelligent kindness requires skill.”

How did we come to have such a weird set of parameters when judging the contributions of our fellow citizens to the common good? Goodhart, inevitably, blames the narcissistic high-flying liberal policymakers who have for a generation attempted to mould the country in their own image. “Politicians who are almost all graduates and whose children mainly attend elite universities, encouraged the school system to focus overwhelmingly on sending students to college… Little thought was given to the psychological impact on those not going to college or to the impact on the economic geography of the country of encouraging the geographical mobility of the most academically able.”

We are back, here, in the territory of Goodhart’s previous book, The Road to Somewhere, in which he argues that a metropolitan, graduate elite imposed a liberal worldview on the rest of the country, resulting in the Brexit backlash. “If you try, you can be like us too,” came the message from the top. And in the era of the knowledge economy, in which the cognitive worker would inherit the Earth, the alternative was to be left behind.

Goodhart’s presentation of working-class values, in his last book and in this one, is too prone to emphasise a rather reactionary form of “small-C” conservatism, when the reality is surely less straightforward. Attachment to family and place and continuity – key “somewhere” values – does not inevitably go along with a suspicion of diversity and an aversion to change (although in certain political conjunctures, it might). And, at times, the author seems a little too keen to gratuitously bait liberal readers. At one point, discussing family values, he even takes a sideswipe at the sexual mores of the Bloomsbury set. But by highlighting dimensions of life and work that have been stripped of prestige in an age of individualism, he performs a valuable service. Many European societies, he observes, have managed to retain respect for “practical vocational intelligence” and people doing “basic jobs”. Given the coming age of automation, Britain urgently needs to start to do the same. As new technology eliminates many white-collar occupations, the age of the cognitive worker may be coming to an end, and with it “the golden age of mass higher education”.

In the final section of the book, Goodhart holds out hope that in richer countries “the ageing of society and the rising visibility of care functions,” as well as “greater concern for place, ecology and belonging”, may herald a new age in which “hand” and “heart” activities are again accorded the status they deserve, while robots become the new “knowledge workers”. That would be a state of affairs to confound Frank Brewin.

• Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century by David Goodhart is published by Penguin (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15