Paul Willis Learning To Labour

Paul Willis encyclopaedism To LabourMuch has been written in the social sciences with heed to the role the education system plays deep down our society. Early investigations into the sociology of education tended to be written inwardly the functionalist tradition with social thinkers such as Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons composing their theories in spite of appearance this framework. This perspective often viewed the education system as necessary for sustaining efficient economic growth and for creating a meritocratic society a society where the al just about talented and able various(prenominal)s can rise by dint of and through the social hierarchy according to their own ability. However, in recent years, social scientists pull in prime the bolshy perspective more useful in fancying the connection between education, society and the economy. This perspective in general sees society as being a site of conflict between diverse groups with education being other battl eground where this conflict is acted issue. The main function of education then in this mount is to continue to reproduce the labour force. But more importantly that the education system favours and depart benefit peerless social group over a nonher namely the dominant and ruling class over the subordinate. This is perhaps a crude oversimplification of the Marxist case but it is important to eat up approximately understanding of this perspective with regard to education as this is the academic context in which acquirement to Labour (1977) was undertaken. It is within this perspective that much of this essay testament focus, as indeed it is the theoretical framework that Paul Willis is writing from. The aim of this paper is to critically engage with the themes and perspectives presented by Willis in his groundbreaking admit on the sociology of education.Before we go on to discuss Learning to Labour it is perhaps important to start with most understanding of what came bef ore so as to high spot how Willis findings broke new ground and pushed the debate around education forward. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976) were writing just before Willis and their approach was very similar in that the thrust of their thesis was concerned with how education prep atomic number 18s pupils for their future roles within the labour market. However, their theories were very much formulated around the notion of direct nurture and because of this they film exposed themselves to the popular criticisms of economic determinism. Willis offers a more sophisticated explanation. Although he acknowledges the existence of conflict within education he does not quite sh ar Bowles and Gintis view that in that location exists a straight forward relationship between education and the economy. For Willis, disciplines are not nearly as successful in churning by a docile workforce as Bowels and Gintis suggest. There is incessantly the opportunity for resistance. The lads o f Learning to Labour have managed to see through the ideological smoke screen of the naturalize day and reject it, while at the homogeneous time creating their own counter-school socialisation. The education system then is not simply a site for cultural reproduction but also a site of production in that it has quite unintentionally created factors (in this case the counter-school culture) which are not particularly beneficial for the reproduction of capitalism.The school used by Willis is situated in a working class housing estate in an industrial town in the Midlands. Willis concentrated his study on a group of 12 working class boys whom he followed through their last year of school and into the first a few(prenominal) months at work. Willis soon found that these boys, who he referred to as the lads, had a distinct attitude towards their teachers and the school. Willis ob litigated that they had developed their own unique culture which was diametrically opposed to the value s ystem of the school. This counter-school culture of the lads blatantly rejected the authority of the school and ascribed no value to academic work and saw no use in the gaining of qualifications.Now it is important to understand what Willis means by the counter-school culture. The acknowledgement of an emergent counter-culture within the school is not in itself new (see Hargreaves, D. 1967) but what is significant about the way Willis uses this idea is that he examines the counter-culture within its wider social context. He quite brilliantly observes that the counter-school culture is not accidental, nor its style quite independent, nor its cultural skills unique or special and that it must be understood within the larger framework of project culture, particularly in relation to shopfloor culture. For Willis, the counter-school culture is rich with symbols and signs of resistance against the formal zone of the school. The lads have, in a symbolic act of sabotage, inverted the value s that the school espouses and created their own value system which is in defiant opposition to the institution. This opposition is mainly countenanced through style, Willis notesIt the counter-school culture is lived out in countless small ways which are special to the school institution, instantly recognised by the teachers, and an al near ritualistic part of the daily material of life for the kids. (Willis, P. 197712)The counter-school culture is a very masculine domain where overt sexist and racist views are quite frequently expressed. The lads continually search out weakness in others and are skilful at undermining the authority of the teachers without it boiling over into outright confrontation. The conforming students are the lads main target after the teachers. The lads tactile sensation superior to them because they, unlike the earoles, have not surrendered their independence to the school they are still able to have a laff.It is this ability of being able to have a laff that is a defining characteristic of being a lad. It also marks them out from the earoles we can make them laff, they cant make us laff. For Willis the laff is a multi-faceted implement of extraordinary importance in the counter-school culture and is a vital weapon in the lads arsenal in their continued struggle of the informal (counter-school) over the formal (school). This winning of symbolic and physical space from the school is illustrated further in the way that the lads seem to construct their own timetable. Through wagging off from classes and always trying to get away with doing the least amount of work, the lads have become highly skilled in exploiting and seizing control of the formal zone of the school. fagot smoking and openly drinking have also become valuable symbols of rebellion as it further marks the lads out from the school institution and instead shows them as belonging to the larger male working-class world. Indeed Willis draws our attention to the similaritie s between the counter-school culture and shopfloor culture. He writesThe really central point about the working-class culture of the shopfloor is that, despite harsh conditions and external direction, people do look for meaning and impose framewhole kit and boodle. They exercise their abilities and seek enjoyment in activity, even where intimately controlled by other. They do, paradoxically, thread through the dead experience of work a living culture which is far from a simple reflex of defeat. This is the same underlying taking hold of an alienating situation as one finds in counter-school culture and its attempt to weave a tapestry through the dry institutional text. (Willis, P. cited in Blackledge Hunt 1985184)When the lads reach the end of their final term and the prospect of work awaits them they remain indifferent to the type of manual unskilled labour they will go on to do. They understand that most manual work in industry is basically the same very little skill is require d and offers no satisfaction. The best the lads can hope for is an apprenticeship or clerical work, however such jobs seem to offer little but take a lot. Although the lads might not be able to articulate it, in some respects they do have some understanding of the workings of capitalism. Willis calls these insights sixth senses, where the lads have been able to see through the ideological fog created by the capitalistic system. An example of this is present in the way that the counter-school culture places no value in the attainment of qualifications through certificates. The conformist student may be convinced by educations meritocratic faade and the promise of upward mobility but the lads know better, they are aware that a few can make itthe class can never follow. They understand that individual success will not ultimately change the position of the working-class, and that only through the collective action of the group will this be achieved. This is articulated by the lads in t he way that they place an important fierceness on loyalty within the group, as Willis observes the essence of being one of the lads lies with the group. The group always comes first and the rejection of qualifications is a rejection of the individualistic nature of the school, which creates competition between class mates with the proliferation of individual awards through exams. As Willis puts it it is unwise for working-class kids to place their trust in diplomas and certificates. These things act not to push people up as in the prescribed account but to maintain there those who are already at the top (Willis, 1977128).Although they may have some understanding of capitalism, Willis contends that while some penetrations have been made the lads still have not fully seen through all of capitalisms ideological justifications. They do not possess a complete overview of how capitalism works to exploit them. In some respects the lads are unwitting conspirators in their own exploitati on in that they are far too willing to get in the world of manual work and in doing so they enter an exploitative system which will ultimately entrap them. Their attitude towards women and ethnic minorities is also destructive. They serve only to divide the working-class making it that much easier to control. For Willis then, it is quite wrong to picture working-class culture or consciousness optimistically as the knife edge in the great march towards rationality and socialism.The lads of Learning to Labour may have realised their own alienation but ultimately it is their own decisions which have trapped them in these exploitative jobs. Willis has tried to make it clear that rather than being a site for the reproduction of one dominant ideology the school can be a place where contradictory ideologies come together in conflict. With this study Willis shows us that it is the lads resistance to school, with the forming of a counter-school culture, that has prepared them for their fut ure roles within the labour force. Their indifference to school and their behaviour in class has paradoxically prepared the lads for the manual unskilled work which they will go on to do. So in this sense education does reproduce the labour force required by capitalism. But it is done not directly and perhaps unintentionally and most importantly of all not without a degree of resistance and struggle.The counter-school culture of the lads, as we have seen, is not beneficial to the reproduction of capitalism, but at the same time it is not particularly harmful. Willis has shown that reproduction is not a simple process with external economic structures manipulating submissive subjects. He is very critical of these structuarlist accounts. As he says Social agents are not still bearers of ideology, but active appropriators who reproduce existing structures only through struggle, contestation and a partial penetration of those structures.Paul Willis ethnographic investigation has been hailed a landmark study by educators and social theorist alike (Giddens 1984, McRobbie 1978). Indeed any detailed discussion on the sociology of education, subcultures or even deviancy within society would seem redundant if there was no reference to Learning to Labour. One writer has remarked that Willis has provided the model on which most subsequent cultural studies investigation within education has been based. However, this does not mean that he is exempt from criticism.David Blackledge and Barry Hunt (1985) take issue with a number Willis conclusions. first of all they find some of his evidence unconvincing can the lads really be representative of the working-class in general? All the pupils at the school are from working-class families including the earoles (who are clearly in the majority) surely they are more representative of working-class values and attitudes. Blackledge and Hunt argue that the values of the conformist students, with their emphasis on academic work, are as much working-class in nature as those of the counter-culture. To support this claim they point to a similar study by David Hargreaves (1967) in which he found a significant delinquent sub-culture existing in a secondary school. Like the school of Willis study, the pupils where predominantly working-class (their fathers were in manual occupations) and he observed that the school was divided into two sub-cultures the delinquescent and the academic. However, unlike Willis, Hargreaves does note that there can be a blurring of the two categories with some students within the academic group displaying delinquent behaviour from time to time. But more importantly Hargreaves maintains that the attitudes of the academic group are consistent with the values of a large section of the working-class. So in this light Blackledge and Hunt remain unconvinced that the values of the lads are the same as the working-class as a whole. They also have trouble excepting the simple dichotomy which is at the heart of this study that there exists just two main groups, the lads and the earoles. For them this does not really do justice to the diversity of the real world in that Willis would have us believe in a one-dimensional world in which there are those who want an education, and those who enjoy life. It never seems to occur to him that these pursuits can be combined, and that the person who takes an interest in his or her education is not, thereby, dull, obsequious and a social conformist. contempt these criticisms Learning to Labour has remained an influential and much discussed text. In fact despite being written from a cultural studies perspective its influence is particularly buckram within sociology. It is within Marxism that its significance has been most far reaching however. It has encouraged Marxist writers to re-evaluate their approach to the understanding of education paying specific attention to the different factors at play instead of providing simplistic explanatio ns of the role of education within society. Willis is very critical of structuarlist accounts which have a tendency to see subjects as passive bearers of ideology who mindlessly reproduce the status-quo. Willis has given social agents the ability to reject the dominant ideological discourses and to resist in the reproduction of existing exploitative structures. Learning to Labour has sometimes been described as a pessimistic book but I can not help but bring a positive interpretation to the text. It is true that ultimately it is the lads own choices that lead them to some of the most exploitative jobs that capitalism has to offer. But by simply having that choice it does cater for the possibility of change. As Willis himself says there is always the possibility of making practices not inevitable by understanding them. This, I would argue, is the key thread which runs through Learning to Labour by understanding the reasons for the forming of a counter-school culture can we bring abo ut positive changes which will be beneficial to everyone and not just the lads. maybe Willis is guilty of using too many Marxist terms uncritically. The way he employs the category of social class within Learning to Labour is maybe a little outdated now. It is not a stable, fixed construct it is more fluid than Willis allows for with an interlinking between race and gender etc. also at times he is arguably guilty of slipping back into traditional Marxist territory with the idea of the state being subservient to capitalist class is that still (if it ever was) the reality? Within a globalised world power is more dispersed and not concentrated in the hands of one ruling bloc but instead there are perhaps different organised groups competing for power. Economic and informational flows can freely transcend national boundaries it is argued (Giddens 1994) that globalisation has acted to decentralise power preventing any one group from wielding too much economic and ideological contro l. However, it is to the credit of Paul Willis that his investigation has remained relevant and important twenty-eight years after it was first published. It is still considered a model example of ethnographic research and has encouraged many other ethnographic studies whose emphasis was on style, resistance and cultural symbols (See McRobbie 1978, Hebdige 1979). Indeed, Anthony Giddens (1984) structuration theory which sees subjects as knowledgeable and active agents owes a considerable debt to the insights made by Willis in Learning to Labour.