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Learning to Labor in New Times
Learning to Labor in New Times foregrounds nine essays which re-examine the work of noted sociologist Paul Willis, 25 years after the publication of his seminal Learning to Labor , one of the most frequently cited and assigned texts in the cultural studies and social foundations of education.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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July 1, 2018
In the late 1970s Paul Willis wrote a key book of educational sociology – ‘Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs’. It was a stunningly interesting book that I must get around to reading over again and finally reviewing. Than 25 years later a group of what would have to be called my superheroes of educational sociology wrote this book. Reading this book could basically save you having to read Weis’s ‘Working Class Without Work’ and her ‘Class Reunion’; and Kenway’s ‘Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis’; and maybe even Jean Anyon’s ‘Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work’ – although, admittedly, more the first two than Anyon’s. Anyon’s articles are available here and are pretty close to life-changing: http://www.jeananyon.org
Willis had been a working class boy himself and was the first person from his school to go to Cambridge. This research was an ethnography where he went to a working class school and followed a group of working class boys in their last year and for a few years afterwards. It is particularly fascinating, because, unbeknown to Willis, he was capturing the end of an era for these boys. That is, with the deindustrialisation of Britain that would come in a rush with the election of Thatcher, the relationship to education that these working class boys exemplified was about to come screaming to an end. Or, at least, in a sense that is true. The problem is that despite the opportunities fast closing down between mucking about at school and then going into a relatively well paying manual job, what such a change in the objective life chances for these bosy does not take into account is the desires and needs of both their social class identities and their masculine identities.
One of the things Willis identifies is that these boys often start off school as good and focused students – but it then becomes patently obvious to them that even if they were to succeed at school, the rewards of that success would be denied them. People aren’t stupid, and they are remarkably good at being able to assess the likely outcomes of various pathways that might otherwise appear open to them, and in assessing the ‘effort to reward’ ratios that are also available.
However, as I mentioned above, school had also been constructed so as to stand in direct opposition to their identities. These working class boys rejected ‘theory’ – what you might call ‘book learning’ – and valorised ‘practice’. Being able to do things was much more important than understanding why. This ‘doing’ then becomes central to their identities – and in turn limits the types of jobs that they might end up doing. For instance, the ideal jobs for them, the ones they would choose themselves, would most likely involve hard, physical labour – not least because this simultaneously validates their working class and masculine identities.
The boys’ relationships with girls is similarly classed and gendered. Although they spend most of their time seeking to have sex with girls, girls that have sex with any of them are immediately devalued. The book has been criticised for it not focusing enough on working class girls – which in some ways is a fair enough criticism. All the same, there is an interview with Willis at the end of this where defends his research from this charge and where he tries to explain what he was seeking to achieve.
But why this anniversary book is particularly interesting is that, as I mentioned above, it contains some chapters where other researchers explain how their research was influenced by Willis’s research and go on to explain how their findings are somewhat different from his. This wasn’t proof that they felt Willis had been wrong, but rather that the world had quickly moved on and so there are new forces acting on working class boys.
That said, a particularly interesting chapter here is Weis’s one – were she talks about her research on Freeway and how its deindustrialising impacted both working class males and females. The short version of this is that working class women proved much more able to adjust to the crash in working class jobs – they went on to become much better educated than the working class males and therefore were much more likely to become employed and to have better paying jobs. Here, being male becomes a literal barrier to economic success. And this also feeds male violence against women too.
One of the things Willis says at the end of this book, that I particularly liked, was that too often people do research so as to confirm a theory – he mentions some ethnographic researchers going into the field with a head full of Bourdieu and then find exactly what Bourdieu suggests they are likely to find. But what Willis says is much more important is to go into the field expecting to be disorientated and confused by much of what you find. It is only then that you might say something interesting and new. I liked this because it sort of mirrored the working class boys’ ideas about theory and practice in an interesting way – although, not entirely, given that Willis does expect theory to guide and direct how we will see and understand what we see – his point being that theory itself needs to be troubled.
This is a fascinating book – it also has a chapter by Fazal Rizvi – I mean, honestly, it doesn’t really get much better than this.
Willis had been a working class boy himself and was the first person from his school to go to Cambridge. This research was an ethnography where he went to a working class school and followed a group of working class boys in their last year and for a few years afterwards. It is particularly fascinating, because, unbeknown to Willis, he was capturing the end of an era for these boys. That is, with the deindustrialisation of Britain that would come in a rush with the election of Thatcher, the relationship to education that these working class boys exemplified was about to come screaming to an end. Or, at least, in a sense that is true. The problem is that despite the opportunities fast closing down between mucking about at school and then going into a relatively well paying manual job, what such a change in the objective life chances for these bosy does not take into account is the desires and needs of both their social class identities and their masculine identities.
One of the things Willis identifies is that these boys often start off school as good and focused students – but it then becomes patently obvious to them that even if they were to succeed at school, the rewards of that success would be denied them. People aren’t stupid, and they are remarkably good at being able to assess the likely outcomes of various pathways that might otherwise appear open to them, and in assessing the ‘effort to reward’ ratios that are also available.
However, as I mentioned above, school had also been constructed so as to stand in direct opposition to their identities. These working class boys rejected ‘theory’ – what you might call ‘book learning’ – and valorised ‘practice’. Being able to do things was much more important than understanding why. This ‘doing’ then becomes central to their identities – and in turn limits the types of jobs that they might end up doing. For instance, the ideal jobs for them, the ones they would choose themselves, would most likely involve hard, physical labour – not least because this simultaneously validates their working class and masculine identities.
The boys’ relationships with girls is similarly classed and gendered. Although they spend most of their time seeking to have sex with girls, girls that have sex with any of them are immediately devalued. The book has been criticised for it not focusing enough on working class girls – which in some ways is a fair enough criticism. All the same, there is an interview with Willis at the end of this where defends his research from this charge and where he tries to explain what he was seeking to achieve.
But why this anniversary book is particularly interesting is that, as I mentioned above, it contains some chapters where other researchers explain how their research was influenced by Willis’s research and go on to explain how their findings are somewhat different from his. This wasn’t proof that they felt Willis had been wrong, but rather that the world had quickly moved on and so there are new forces acting on working class boys.
That said, a particularly interesting chapter here is Weis’s one – were she talks about her research on Freeway and how its deindustrialising impacted both working class males and females. The short version of this is that working class women proved much more able to adjust to the crash in working class jobs – they went on to become much better educated than the working class males and therefore were much more likely to become employed and to have better paying jobs. Here, being male becomes a literal barrier to economic success. And this also feeds male violence against women too.
One of the things Willis says at the end of this book, that I particularly liked, was that too often people do research so as to confirm a theory – he mentions some ethnographic researchers going into the field with a head full of Bourdieu and then find exactly what Bourdieu suggests they are likely to find. But what Willis says is much more important is to go into the field expecting to be disorientated and confused by much of what you find. It is only then that you might say something interesting and new. I liked this because it sort of mirrored the working class boys’ ideas about theory and practice in an interesting way – although, not entirely, given that Willis does expect theory to guide and direct how we will see and understand what we see – his point being that theory itself needs to be troubled.
This is a fascinating book – it also has a chapter by Fazal Rizvi – I mean, honestly, it doesn’t really get much better than this.
Displaying 1 of 1 review