There might be more mileage in my giving some thought in the coming weeks to the books I would take to a desert island, but if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you can probably work the list out for yourself because I am not, it turns out, a complicated creature.  You may not therefore be surprised to find out that one of my top eight reads would be ‘Head Hand Heart’ by David Goodhart, to which I want to return more than once in the coming weeks, because there are still some of his highly perceptive observations that I want to share with you.

I have recently embarked on my annual task – though the word ‘task’ makes it sound like a chore when I actually find it a pleasure – of meeting with all our Upper Sixth pupils to review their university applications or to discuss their alternative plans for what they will do when they leave here, which always provokes some interesting conversations. Now that my daughter has completed her undergraduate degree, it has been insightful to see the pros and cons of her experiences at university, not least because she was there during the pandemic.

Thanks to a large dose of her mother’s common sense, she has become a perceptive observer of life despite only being twenty-two.  For example, I have always been struck by her comment that her primary education did not prepare her for secondary school, that her GCSEs did not prepare her for A Levels and that the Sixth Form did not prepare her for higher education.  Given that I was her head teacher for all these transitions, I will of course hold my hands up for this, though I do not think her experience is much different from my own back in the seventies and eighties, or indeed from most other people’s.

David Goodhart in ‘Head Hand Heart’ makes the point that the key element of the modern university is the social skills that people acquire, often living away from home for the first time and mixing with people from different backgrounds.  It is not so much the going to lectures, completing the essays or doing the experiments that matter, but rather the ability to organise a meeting or work cooperatively with other people to achieve a goal – sometimes academic, but more usually social.

He says that this is a new version of the very old idea of joining a community of scholars and thereby becoming a better and different kind of person – more refined, more knowledgeable - closer to God, if you will.  In more recent history, the private boarding school similarly included a character-building and character-changing offer to parents who sent their children there – though unfortunately not always in a positive way, as we have seen all too often in recent years.

The modern case for the residential university experience might therefore be seen, in part, as a more egalitarian way of spreading the magical confidence that is often thought to exude from young people emerging from elite schools.  Though, as the author acknowledges, the oft-quoted charm, polish and soft skills associated with the privately educated are surely inculcated at least partly at home, and the jury is probably still out on whether it is nature or nurture that has the upper hand in such issues.

Goodhart continues that it is true that social skills are increasingly essential to many professional jobs, not least as the more routine intellectual calculations and judgements are automated, and it is assumed that three or four years away from home can breed confidence, self-reliance and openness to different people and situations, which is no doubt the case for many students.  It is certainly true in an increasingly multi-ethnic society, but one which is often quite ethnically segregated, that universities bring people from different ethnicities into close contact often for the first time.  Set against that, the residential university experience also seems to be responsible for a sharp rise in mental health issues among students, which are sometimes serious enough to result in a young person taking their own life.

But is a degree worth the time and, nowadays, the money?  The answer, of course, is that it depends on what you want to do.  There are some professions or vocations – with medicine, law, engineering and teaching some obvious examples – where progress without a degree will be difficult to the point of impossible.  In other areas such as humanities and languages, including English, a degree may not be worth as much as it used to be – depending on what criteria are used to judge value.

In many ways, education is like a computer game, with each stage unlocking a new level.  The better you do, the more choice you have as you move through it, and the more likely you are to get to a higher level faster.  As Goodhart says, it also depends on the employment market at the end of the game.  If everyone else is hiring graduates, this can create a herd effect that makes everyone do it.  But, he says, one of the issues in hiring too many young people who have exam-passing ability but little experience of life is that they may be weak on the non-cognitive aspects which are actually required for most jobs – leadership, communication and dealing with difficult people and situations. 

He argues, persuasively in my opinion, that we therefore need to find ways to embed more clearly into education at all levels the recognition of core ‘human’ skills that are essential in the workplace.  This might just be a polite way of saying that there are far too many plausible middle-class people with good social skills, now credentialised with degrees, who are quite poor at what they do.  The people they manage can see this, or indeed the people they govern, and it undermines legitimacy in the respective organisations where they were educated or where they work.   

As one worker put it, ‘In my industry, I've been held back by not having a degree.  I've seen people who have a degree move on into better positions.  They don't care what the degree is in, they just take them on and pass them through.  They are absolutely useless at their job.  Having a degree just opens the door, it doesn't matter what it's in.  I've had to fight my corner and use my experience.’

This comes back to the crux of the book, which is the argument that we attach too much weight to those who are perceived to be clever, regardless of whether they are actually any good at what they do.  Across the developed world, the author tells us, the one quality-of-life indicator that is said to be declining is mental health.  Mental well-being depends on a sense of meaning and purpose, and a feeling that we are part of something larger than ourselves, useful to and needed by others – as confirmed by happiness research.  It is our attachments that give us meaning and purpose.  The most powerful route to meaning is through love, mutual dependence and serving others - in other words, the realm of the Heart.