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

By Paul Willis

Categories: Education & Teaching, Politics & Social Sciences

Sociologist Paul Willis followed twelve working-class boys, known as the lads, through their final years at a secondary school in the English Midlands and into their first jobs. His study, first published in 1977, is widely cited in the sociology of education. Willis shows how the lads' counter-school culture, which rejects the authority of teachers and the worth of schoolwork, leads them toward manual labor, so that their own resistance helps reproduce the class position into which they were born.

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• Seth Godin: “Ethnographic research from the 1970s that makes and proves a startling thesis: the very structure of school ends up establishing the “us and them” mentality that alienates most students from authority and sets them up to be unhappy wage slaves instead of productive leaders.”