ABSTRACT
Undoubtedly the broader social environment of the 1960s with its student and antiwar movements, placed youth prominently in the media and in the cultural consciousness in the United States and in the West overall. This youth consciousness infected the sociology of education and studies of youth multiplied. Another milestone study, this one ethnographic in method, was Willis's Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977). Before Willis, researchers had viewed the school and students from the adult expectations of equality of opportunity in schools or the belief that schools were primarily places for learning the formal curriculum. Willis focused upon students' understandings of differentiated school lives in a stratified society; his "lads" saw through the sham of unequal schooling and mocked it, but were nevertheless trapped in blue collar jobs.
