Learning to Labor: how working class kids get working class jobs - Paul

Willis (1977)

Learning to Labor has come to be seen as seminal in terms of working class studies
and is one of the most quoted education books ever. Its importance lay in giving a
cultural dimension to already well argued structural accounts of pupil behavior. It
remains topical especially in the light of current media panics about the
underachievement of boys, while its stress that the reason for male working class
alienation from schooling lay in working class culture is an important foil to
contemporary discourses on school effectiveness. The alienation that Willis found
among his working class 'lads' is not one that can be solved by internal school
manipulation. It is not capable of school solutions because it is not caused by the
particular practices of schools as schools, but by the place that schools occupy
within the structures of class domination, and principally the demands that schools
make on pupils' time.

Willis studied 12 working class boys in a midlands secondary school. He argued that
'these lads' (as they identified themselves) formed a distinctive "counter-school
sub-cultural grouping" characterized by opposition to the values and norms
perpetuated throughout the school. This group of disaffected boys felt superior to
the more conformist pupils who they disparagingly labeled as 'ear oles'. They
showed little interest in academic work, preferring instead to amuse themselves as
best they could through various forms of deviant behavior in which 'having a laff'
became the main objective of the school day. The lads also tried to identify with the
adult, non-school world, by smoking, drinking and expressing strongly sexist and
racist attitudes. Academic work had no value for these boys who had little interest
in gaining qualifications and saw manual work as superior to mental work.

While most sociological studies of the 1960s, 70s and 80s saw educational failures
as passive victims of socialization, social deprivation or unfavorable labeling by the
school, Willis' work painted a different picture of some working class children
actively failing themselves by developing cultures of resistance in opposition to
schooling. The book was ground breaking in its day and has continued to have a
lasting impact on thinking about class and education. Its influence came primarily
because it was the first major educational study to link culture and social action to
wider structural processes. Willis showed that the education system was failing to
produce ideal compliant workers for the capitalist system. Rather the lads' counter
school culture contained some perceptive insights into the nature of capitalism for
workers. The lads recognize that there are no equal opportunities under capitalism
and no matter how hard they work their chances of success remain far lower than
those of the middle class pupils. They can see through the careers advice given at
school and know that even if they were to work really hard the chances of getting a
professional or desk job are very low. There is recognition that individual effort is
likely to achieve little in terms of future prospects and a strong investment in a
male working class peer group. For the ‘lads’ collective loyalty to the group
superseded commitment to schooling. The book contrasts individual mobility and
academic success, possible for the few, with the impossibility of educational success
ever being a route of upward mobility for a whole class, and emphasizes the
importance of peer group cultures:
 
The group is special and more than the sum of its individual parts…the power that
is thus generated in the group and its unspecified open nature, constitutes an
important social force. It is partly from this source that wider symbolic cultural
articulations are generated