Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs - Softcover

Willis, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0566002272 ISBN 13: 9780566002274

Publisher: Saxon House, 1978

Synopsis

This book which has now established itself as a classic study of working class boys describes how Paul Willis followed a group of 'lads' as they passed through the last two years of school and into work. The book explains that for 'the lads' it is their own culture which blocks teaching and prevents the realisation of liberal education aims. This culture exposes some of the contradictions within these formal aims and actually supplies the operational criteria by which a future in wage labour is judged. Paul Willis explores how their own culture can guide working class lads on to the shop floor. This is an uncompromising book which has provoked considerable discussion and controversy in educational circles throughout the world - it has been translated into Finnish, German, French, Swedish, Japanese and Spanish.

About this title

Review

'This book is a remarkable achievement. To attempt to summarise it is to trivialise its riches. It is the best book on male working class youth since Whyte's Street Corner Society (1943). It demands to be read and re-read and we shall feel its resonances for many years.' ----- David H. Hargreaves, New Society

'Paul Willis has done education a service in producing this book. If, as a result of reading it, those with some power in education were to institute changes based on the evidence he has presented, we should all benefit - and this includes "the lads".' -----Harry Ree, Times Education Supplement

About the Author

Paul Willis

Edition details

• Publisher: Saxon House
• Publication date: 1978
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0566002272
• ISBN 13: 9780566002274
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214