Learning to Labour

by Paul Willis

Summary and Evaluation of the Research

 Learning to
Labour is one of
the classic pieces of
sociological
research from the
1970s. Willis use
overt participant
observation to
explore why
working class lads
fail at school.
Working class
lads are also
known as
Macho lads.
 Given the practical and ethical problems of conducting
participant observation in a school setting, there are only a
handful of such studies which have been carried out in the UK,
and these are mainly historical, done a long time ago.

We can consider this one a Learning to Labour by Paul

classic participant observation
study - Paul Willis‘ Learning to
Labor (1977) - in the context of
education.
He spent a total of 18 months
observing the lads in school and
then a further 6 months
following them into work. The
study aimed to uncover the
question of how and why
“working class kids get working
class jobs”.
Willis (1977) is an ethnographic
study of twelve working class
‘lads’ from a school in
Birmingham conducted
between 1972 and 1975.
He used a wide range of
qualitative research
methodologies from interviews,
group discussions to participant
observation, aiming to
understand participants’ actions
from the participants’ point of
view in everyday contexts.
Willis concentrated on a particular boy’s group in a non-selective
secondary school in the Midlands, who called themselves ‘lads’.
They were all white, although the school also contained many
pupils from West Indian and Asian backgrounds. The school
population was approximately 600, and the school was
predominantly working class in intake. He states that the main
reasons why he selected this school was because it was the typical
type of school attended by working class pupils.
How Paul Willis gathered data for the
research?
Willis attended all school classes, options (leisure activities) and
career classes which took place at various times. He also spoke
to parents of the 12 ‘lads’, senior masters of the school, and
main junior teachers as well as careers officers in contact with
the concerned ‘lads’. He also followed these 12 ‘lads’ into work
for 6 months. He also made extensive use of unstructured
interviews, but here we’re focusing on the observation aspects.

It has been suggested that the boys may have acted up more to
"show off" to Willis. This might have occurred when they were
being observed (the Hawthorne Effect - people behave
differently when they know they're being watched) and when
they were interviewed (an interviewer effect).
Participant observation allowed Willis to immerse himself into
the social settings of the lads and gave him the opportunity to ask
the lads (typically open) questions about their behaviour that day
or the night before, encouraging them to explain themselves in
their own words…which included detailed accounts of the lads
fighting, getting into trouble with teachers, bunking lessons,
setting off fire extinguishers for fun and vandalising a coach on a
school trip.

They had formed what Willis called an anti-school subculture.

Within this subculture it was "cool" to "mess about" and to fail. It
really turned the values of the school on their head. From the
perspective of this subculture, children who the school viewed
positively were the "ear'oles" ("swots"). The last thing you wanted
was praise from a teacher. Instead, children could get praise
within the group for truancy, bad behaviour and discriminatory
attitudes (there was a lot of racism, sexism and homophobia
within the group).
Learning to
Labour:
Findings
 One of Willis most
important findings was that
the lads were completely
uninterested in school, they
saw the whole point of
school as ‘having a laugh’
rather than trying to get
qualifications. Their
approach to school was to
survive it, to do as little work
as possible, and to have as
much fun as possible by
pushing the boundaries of
authority and bunking as
much as they could.

The reason they didn’t value

education is because they
anticipated getting factory
jobs which didn’t require
any formal qualifications.
They saw school as a ‘bit
cissy’ and for middle class
kids.
Importance of
this Study
With these findings, Willis does not only undermine the
arguments of Parsons or Durkheim, but also of his fellow
Marxists, Bowles & Gintis. First, he concluded that school
was not working very well as an agent of socialisation: there
was no value consensus here: pupils were actively rejecting
the norms and values of society. As such, they were a long
way from the hard-working, docile, obedience workers
suggested by Bowles & Gintis! And yet the outcome was
much the same: the children of working-class parents going
on to do working-class jobs.

In this study they played an active role in this: they thought

school was boring and pointless and was something they had
to endure until they could go to work. They had a similar
attitude to work, and got through it using similar techniques:
"messing about" and "having a laugh".
Willis was coming from a Marxist perspective, his study does suggest
that working-class boys actively chose to fail, rather than the system
being designed by the capitalist class to have this outcome. He did
suggest that this ultimately benefited capitalism, because there wasn't
a meritocracy and instead class inequality was reproduced, and there
would not be a revolution because workers had learnt a coping
strategy for doing boring, unfulfilling work ("having a laff").
However, it did not produce the productive, docile workers
capitalists might ideally like to have working for them!
Thank
you!!