ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the educational experiences of the 24 working-class young men, their reflections on their educational trajectory and how class and masculinity inflected this experience. It entails an analysis of journeys through and engagement with compulsory and post-compulsory education, as well as aspirations for and understandings of higher education. Analysing the young men’s experiences reveals the impact of social and cultural processes upon their orientation to formalised learning and its attendant consequences on their ‘horizons for action’. The participants’ narratives problematise the polarised manner in which boys’ educational effort and attainment is often described. Their experiences also provide a challenge to both the dominant theories of (masculine) resistance which attempt to explain working-class educational failure, and the ‘trouble with boys discourse’ that pervades contemporary media and political representations.
