Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs

The two books that have contributed most to the way I think about the social world and what it means to be are Simone DeBeauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity and Paul Willis' Learing to Labor. The first one hundred pages of Willis' book are loaded with insights and antidotes to conventional wisdom: Why are working class students often anti-school and generally anti-authoritatian? Because schools ask a great deal in terms of work, conformity, fun foregone, and deference to school officials, but they offer little or nothing in return: working class children are almost certain to become working class adults. Thus, the absence of a basis for exchange generates hostility and resentment. Is that such a bad thing? It's tough on teachers, counselors, administrators, and on students who see reason to conform. But in the 1970's when Learning to Labor was written, a working class life in a British industrial city was reasonably comfortable and had it's own rewards. So from the classroom to the shopfloor was a natural and easy transition to the world of work for the sons of working class fathers. For readers in the U.S., the absence of interest in upward mobility may seem self-defeating, and may be taken as evidence of family dysfunction. Oddly, however, the families studied by Willis seem supportive and warm; sons admire their fathers and have respect and affection for their mothers; fathers and mothers share their sons' alienation from schooling; and their reasons seem readily interpretable and in no way manifestations of family dysfunction. The anti-authoritarian students embrace the ethos of masculinity and toughness that provide their occupationally devalued fathers with self-esteem. Sadly this way of valorizing a working class life assures that the British working class will remain suffused with pernicious sexism. It's easy to romanticize Willis' working class rebels, and he sometimes makes this mistake. Whatever their attractive qualities, however, sexism, racism, and active derision toward same-aged students with a different mind-set are conspicuous characteristics of their way of life. Perhaps the most troubling question for 21st century readers of Willis' book is what happens to working class students today? The factory floor is unoccupied. Working class jobs have been moved enmasse to third world countries to reduce labor costs. A well-defined social identity and lived culture have been destroyed. Again we see that whatever our position, nothing much is guaranteed. All this is part of the often very painful process of what DeBeauvoir call "disclosure of being in the world."

This book is apparently a classic in the fields of cultural studies and ethnography, and I agree that it's certainly one of the stronger examples of the form. This study by Paul Willis, which was conducted in the 70s, 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.This particular subject matter is surely outdated, even in England itself as the education system there has (mostly) moved away from a focus on dividing kids by class, then doing nothing for the 'problem' kids but preparing them for menial jobs in industry. However, there is much to think about concerning the larger issues that Willis raises, especially the rigid tendencies of the class system (not just in England), and the methods used by those at the bottom to cope with a system they probably will not be able to get out of. The 'analysis' section of the book gets a bit sluggish as Willis performs the required ivory-tower application of theories to the findings he collected while sojourning with the working class kids. The predictable treatise on Marxist theories of labor and capital gets especially tiresome, though otherwise Willis still manages to keep the theory section mostly interesting, as he builds on crucial insights into class structures and the dark side of industrial society. All this from hanging with a bunch of rowdy and potty-mouthed British schoolkids. ...

I use Willis' work every semester in my graduate level educational research methods class. It is one of first and most influential efforts to bring together a marxist focus on macro-social dynamics, a symbolic interactionist focus on micro-social interactions, and a phenomenological focus on individual consicousness into a single study of class reproduction. It is a classic in every sense.

I came to Dr. Willis's Learning To Labor as a Ph.D. student at York University, Toronto. I was profoundly moved both theoretically and personally. Willis gives us a theoretical way of articulating macro and micro perspectives which shows how the two arise in dialectical fashion, e.g. class determines the working class lives of the lads through the very choices of the lads themselves! It was, and still is, a brilliant insight and contribution in relation to ongoing discussions of structure/agency and the whole question of determinism. Dr. Willis's work also touched base with my own life. I grew up in a cotton mill town in South Carolina. The local school was closely tied to the local manufacturing plants and the surrounding working-class, both in the fields and the mills. I saw the life of the lads as nearly identical with the life of the white, working class kids that I went to school with. Most of my high school friends saw going to college as a "waste of time" and for "sissies". Real work required real men! Most ended up in the local cotton mills. Many of these young men had promising lives that could have been realized, but at those structural moments choices were made that reproduced the local working-class. I have since written my own ethnographic work (Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000) and I have to say that Dr. Willis's work was always a big help and resource for thinking through the relationship between reproduction and resistance. A must read for anyone on the verge of ethnographic research and for the general reader as well.