Working Class Without Work: High School Students in A De-Industrializing Economy

by Lois Weis

The author wxplores issues of race, class, and gender among white working class youths, and she considers the roles of school and family in the production of the self. The book also examines the working class teens' attitudes toward and readiness for postfeminist thinking and the emerging American New Right. Presenting the first sustained ethnographic investigation of white working class youth in the context of deindustrializatin, Weis offers a complex portrait of how these young people produce themselves in a society vastly different from that of their parents and grandparents.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 22, 1990

About the author

Dr. Weis is author, co-author or editor of numerous books and articles that focus on race, class and gender in American schools.

Dr. Weis is Past President of the American Educational Studies Association and is on the editorial boards of several journals, including Educational Policy, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and Review of Educational Research.

Dr. Weis was awarded the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor, the highest faculty rank in the State University of New York system. The award recognizes full professors of national or international prominence for outstanding achievement in research and scholarship. In addition, Weis and co-author Michelle Fine received the 2006 Critic Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association for their book, Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States School.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of the books I read related to the sociology of education are basically concerned with how schools help to reproduce the class and social structures that exist in society. Recently I’ve become interested in the work of Jean Anyon, particularly where she went into schools and noted the various ways they differed according to the social class of the kids who were attending. The working class kids were given work that was effectively meaningless to them, but that had to be ‘learnt’ rote fashion and regurgitated whole on request. They are being prepared for jobs where they will have to follow orders, they are being trained in following orders without thinking. This breeds resentment and resistance, but generally this resistance is self-defeating and only goes to prove these kids ‘couldn’t cut it’. The lower middle class kids have to be able to find the right passage or the right method of solving a problem from a book, most of their education is focused on this. They are being trained to be low-level bureaucrats, people who know there is a right and a wrong way, the right way is in the book of regulations. The upper middle class kids are taught to challenge, and think and create knowledge. They are going to be the journalists and the artist – they will need to learn how to be creative, so that is what they are trained to be. The upper class aren’t as concerned about where knowledge comes from – they just want as much of it as they can get their hands on. Knowledge is capital, more is better. All a bit ‘Brave New World’.

This fits pretty comfortably with other stuff I’ve been interested in for the last few years – like Bourdieu’s ideas on Reproduction. So, this book started off being a bit of a surprise to me. She begins by saying that she doesn’t really think reproduction is the best way to understand what is going on in our society at the moment and that it was something that only really made sense in Capitalism’s golden age (pretty well from 1950 to 1979). She quotes Connell, an Australian educational sociologist, who says that people have noticed that the job market is fundamentally changing and that if you want to put a floor under your kids so that they don’t end up living in poverty, then education is seen as the best solution. The author’s point here is that working class parents aren’t really after reproduction of their own way of living, they can see that is dead or dying – they are after reproduction of economic security – like that line from The Leopard, if things are going to stay the same, things are going to have to change. It is better to not think so much about ‘reproduction’ as it is to think about social movements.

Then the book provides a wealth of research that was done in a town in the US that is suffering through deindustrialisation and the consequent problems that the workers who have lived off the steal and iron mills that had previously employed virtually all of the locals are facing. The book is broken up into various chapters focused on the main players in this particular game: the white working class boys in the schools, the white working class girls in the schools, their teachers and then their parents. At this stage I found myself wondering about the role of theory in all of this. Too often in books like this someone will say something, like ‘I’m not interested in reproduction, but rather in social movements’. And I’ll think – oh yeah. But once I’ve finished the book I can’t for the life of me work out what possible difference this has actually made to their research. For a lot of this book that question annoyed me like a kind of itch – by the end my breath was taken away. I want to stress this – she was talking to someone who was very much in the other camp, and now I’m left with lots to think about.

I can only do a summary, but when she was talking to the boys the things that really came to the fore was the idea that they hated school, but saw it as now about the only option available to them. They did the absolute minimum work they could getaway with, actually, mostly they were learning how to feign interest and attentiveness in class, rather than work. This was shown in numerous ways, but the ones that have stuck with me are that when collectively reading a book in class, when the teacher called on someone else to continue on with the reading the teacher would invariably need to tell them where they were up to. The other telling example was that students NEVER challenged what they had been told in class, so that the only questions ever asked in class were on process issues, (is this really due in next Friday? How many words do you want? Which colour pen should I write this in?). Actually, there was one case where something a teacher said was challenged, something that is chilling in its implications – that is, when the teacher said something about alcoholism one of the kids challenged what was said, that being a topic the kids felt much more qualified to talk about.

The boys basically wanted to get jobs, and education was seen as providing some sort of credential necessary to achieve that. They were disturbingly racist. And this was particularly true against black males and especially if they said anything to ‘their’ women (the white, working class girls in the school). All the same, their defence of ‘their’ women only extended to defending them from black males that they assumed wanted to treat these girls as sex objects. The fact they too wanted to treat these very same girls in the very same way never posed anything like a contradiction for them.

They saw themselves getting married after school and many referred to this as their expectation – in ways that you might have expected girls in the 1950s to talk about leaving school and getting married. The best of all possible outcomes for these boys and these future relationships would be to have the little woman staying home and looking after their kids in a kind of delightful (and utterly subservient) domestic bliss. A few saw that this might not be economically possible, but this was very few, and even these still saw this as the ideal. The dream was male domination based on the male providing the money.

The girls weren’t nearly so interested in this envisioned future. Of all of the girls interviewed only one was choosing a career that would provide pin money so that she could get married and live the kind of life virtually all of the boys wanted for their wives. All of the other girls thought this girl was completely insane. The issue as the girls saw it was that that sort of dream might have been okay in the stone age when you got married at 15 and by 25 your husband had been eaten by a dinosaur, but if you are going to live until you were 80, what are the chances you will still be together with someone by then? The idea of divorce was key for these girls, and structured how they thought about their futures, and unlike the boys who virtually all saw themselves being married after they finished school, hardly any of the girls mentioned this at all and when this was finally raised by the author many of them said things like, ‘oh yeah, maybe when I’m 30’. Finding a way to be independent was the key.

The chapter on the teachers was particularly interesting. Not just because they mostly blamed the kids for their failure at school, but also because their jobs were becoming increasingly dominated by the confining rules and procedures set by ‘the administration’. This managerialism was questioning their professionalism and turning them into ‘proletarians’ – that is, de-skilled automatons that just need to follow the procedures and do that without question.

One of the real concerns here was that there had been a time when the teachers, who were mostly locals and so had come from the same class as everyone else about the place, where very much lower paid than the people who worked in industry. This, obviously enough, caused quite a bit or resentment. ‘What’d ya go to school for all them years for if ya was just gonna scrape by on hardly more an apprentice wage?’ The tables had turned, the factories were closed, but the resentments remained. But there were other complications – not least that often people got jobs in the schools that were due to networks rather than to merit or even qualifications. Also, schools are socially located, and so many of the issues that existed between the students – sexism, racism and so on – also existed in the staff room. There were separate areas for men and women. But while the men could ‘invade’ the women’s space, the opposite never happened. Also, while the female teachers would complain about how the male teachers seemed to want them to clean up after them – they did this anyway, even while complaining! The hidden curriculum here (something that is always out in the open where no one can quite see it) is the reproduction of gender roles so that these are seen as completely normal. Lots of female teachers doing the work, lots of male administrators setting the rules.

The parents were particularly interesting. Invariably they wanted their kids to get an education and to get out of town. Like their daughters, they certainly didn't want their kids to get married too young, a mistake many of them, both male and female, felt they had made. They knew there was no work in town anymore and so an education was about the only escape route open. The problem was that the parents rarely had any idea of what they could do to help their kids get an education that would facilitate this escape. One parent summed up the problem when he said that his grandfather had worked in the mill and certainly didn’t want his son to work there, but when his father came to leave school his grandfather got him a job in the mill. Then his father didn’t want him to work in the mill, but when the time came he got him a job there too. The problem was there was no more jobs in the mill, the cycle had to finish for his son, but it wasn’t all that clear what would happen next. Wanting something not to happen for the last three generations hadn’t been nearly enough to stop it from actually happening – what would happen once it stopped wasn’t at all clear, but education was seen as the solution. As Bourdieu would say, these people don’t have the academic capital available to them to help their kids succeed in school. And, they are quite sure that helping their kids at school is the school’s job, not their own. Unfortunately, without the added assistance from a home environment that creates the conditions for success at school, such success is virtually impossible.

This is where it all gets interesting. We aren’t looking at a time of social reproduction, because the jobs that would have enabled such reproduction don’t exist any more. In fact, it is worse than that. The main jobs that are ‘growth’ areas in the US economy are (or were at the time this was written in 1990) low-level service jobs – and these are both low paid and generally associated with females. Working class family structures have been formed around the notion of a male breadwinner and a female ‘bringing in a little extra’ for ‘the extras’ in life. This was the economic basis for the sexism of such family structures. As the guy had the money, male and female relationships formed on the basis of a kind of economic dependency – one in which women did the housework, raised the kids and provided sex on demand and if she didn’t the man might just take his pay check off with him to some woman that was prepared to meet these demands. But the collapse of working class jobs, particularly male working class jobs was stripping society of the economic basis upon which such a sexual divisions could be maintained. Ironically, the notions of a ‘family wage’ – where women’s work had been undervalued in the labour market for decades due to it always being seen as supplemental to the male wage – now meant that families were much more likely to have to get by on these very much too low female waged jobs.

The collapse of industrial jobs had, obviously enough, also seen a collapse in industrial trade unionism. Something that had long sustained the working class as an effective ‘class in itself’, that is, as a class able to assert its own interests, along with good pay, conditions, and so on. This is where we start talking about social movements. With labour unions in decline it isn’t all that clear what might replace them for these people. The raising power of women – even if they have lower wages, the fact they have a wage at all is putting them in an economic relationship with men that is quite different from what existed previously – might mean these women become attracted to some new forms of feminism. The author argues this is because women form a kind of sexual class – and although differences between women in terms of social class are still evident, commonalities between them in terms of their sex can’t be completely ignored.

She makes it plain that such a social movement coming into being isn’t entirely obvious or inevitable. Well, you know, it would make sense for women to see themselves in terms of a feminist collective class, but she repeatedly makes it clear that the girls she interviews mostly frame their problems with marriage, careers and so on as individual problems, and social movements need to be based on an idea of an ‘us’, an us that faces similar problems and that is seeking common solutions through collective action, not just an us that are all doing similar things in isolation.

The idea that had the most chilling effect on me was the idea that the social movement we might see growing is that of the new right. This, she felt, would be particularly attractive to working class males – you know, given the racism and sexism that she had found to be so much a ‘ho-hum’ aspect of the white, working class male identity she noted in the school boys. Without the economic means to sustain the lifestyle that they desired, white, working class males were likely to be attracted to the most conservative sides of new right ideology – an ideology that stresses god as man’s head, man as woman’s head and the reassurance that all that is wrong with the world is due to society not following the Biblical certainty written in stone.

But she also was concerned that rather than women turning to feminism, that the social movement that they might in fact be attracted to may well be that of the new right too – just not the same flavour of new right that the boys found appealing. That is, for the girls, a new right based on libertarianism – one that stresses individual merit, despite the gender of the individual and of individual value over collective value. In both cases, the working class’s greatest strength, that of class solidarity and collective action, would be undermined by individualistic notions harping back to a world that is now dead and gone, or rather, existing only in the longing of those suffering the most under the new world order.

Tea Party anyone?