Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs

Introduction

The book ‘Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs’ describes how Paul Willis followed a group of lads as they passed through the last two years of school and into work. It explains that the lads’ own culture blocks the teaching and prevents the realization of the aims of liberal education. It also exposes some of the contradictions within these formal aims and supplies the operational criteria by which a future wage labour is judged. Willis explores how their own culture can guide working class lads onto the shop floor. The ethnographic study of the lads showed how class and gender combined as they expressed their resistance to schooling through an aggressive masculinity and disruptive counter-school culture.

Willis argued that the lads formed a distinctive counter-school sub-cultural grouping characterized by opposition to the values and norm perpetuated throughout the school. According to him, lads showed little interest in academic work, preferring instead to amuse their selves as best they could through various forms of deviant behaviour. Academic work had no value for these boys who had little interest in gaining qualifications and saw manual work as superior to mental work. Furthermore, lads also tried to identify with the adult, non-school world, by smoking, drinking and expressing strongly sexist and racist attitudes.

Learning to Labour 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 behaviour. 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.

Criticisms

Willis evaluated the students, teachers, and parents in a school that was deemed a model of progressive education in England. He found that the reality of progressive education was very different from the promise. The students who received less attention were the lower performing children who were from lower working class families. On the other hand, the teacher spent more time with were higher performing children who were also from a higher social class. (as cited in Grossen, 1998)

He also concluded that the working class status of the boys was perpetuated by their own behavior and that working class behavior was given freer reign in progressive environments. The boys' school behavior and values all corresponded directly with the culture of shop floor workers and served to ensure that the boys would inherit the working class status of their fathers. (as cited in Grossen, 1998)

The book is apparently a classic in the fields of cultural studies and ethnography. This study by Paul Willis is certainly free of the political correctness and obsession with romanticizing other cultures that later polluted the field and drained its credibility. Willis' study on working class kids in England and the issues they face in joining the workforce can be seen as interesting in itself; as such issues were surely overlooked by lofty academics before and since. Especially rewarding is Willis' method of actually making himself a believable member of a group of lower class boys at school and then following them into the industrial workforce after graduation. This adds an immense amount of credibility to the study. (Nutricraze Bookstore, 2000-2006)

Willis' work also 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. (Reay, n.d.)

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. (Reay, n.d.)

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. 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. (Reay, n.d.)

Point of View

The lads are correct to see that labour and its use is at the heart of their struggles including their struggles at school. Their refusal to cooperate at the school is equivalent to the withholding of labour; thus a form of class struggle. The lads can even penetrate the knowledge of labour as a special commodity which Willis believes that this confirms Marx’s own discovery about labour. Turning to the education system, education exists and acts only beyond functional reproduction of culture. A certain amount of cultural demystification can take place in schools although this can still end in a reproduction of the system.

The form of resistance in school shows the strength of lads. What the lads succeeded in doing this is to deny the equivalence of teacher paradigms; thus denying that teacher can offer a route through school for working class kids. Working class culture prefers its own knowledge of reality and most importantly, the reality of the job market. Working class lads are correct to see that most work is meaningless and de-skilled in perceiving the structural nature of employment.

We could not deny the fact that this is still happening in Hong Kong and in other countries. Class distinction in the education system is rampant. Students from lower working families received less attention from teachers so they tend to be poor performers. However, their perspective is much superior to the official version of the realities supplied by the school since they engage lot of actual work and part-time work outside school.

Moreover, lower class children can’t reach the top classes since they don’t have social and culture capital. The teacher, on the other hand, spent more time with children from higher social class; thus they tend to be higher performing students. In other words, the teachers assumed that these children are going to end up working in class occupations.