ABSTRACT
It proved far easier to map correspondence theories on to European school systems which divided secondary age pupils into academic and non-academic tracks, often taught in entirely different schools, rather than the comprehensive American high schools in which all pupils were encouraged to compete for the highest possible adult positions. In his widely acclaimed book, Learning to Labour (1977), Paul Willis studied the responses of a small group of working class male pupils (known as ‘the lads’) to their experiences in the lower streams of a secondary modern school (to which 11 year olds who failed to gain grammar school places were allocated at that time), in a town in England’s heavily industrialised midlands. ‘Mechanistic’ reproduction theories had portrayed working class pupils as accepting working class futures because they had no alternative but to be realistic. However, in Willis’s account ‘the lads’ were far from docile and played active roles in enthusiastically embracing working class futures. ‘The lads’ were bringing into school knowledge and values acquired from their working class homes. They realised that most school knowledge was useless, and knew they did not need the qualifications that would confer access to ‘sissy’, effeminate, office jobs because the lads intended to become ‘real men’ doing ‘real work’, earning good money in the local factories. Thus their school-lives became essays in ‘resistance’. They would disrupt classroom learning whenever possible. Through their attitudes, dress and daily demeanour they displayed contempt for teachers. They were in fact ‘learning to labour’; learning the techniques of resistance and the virtues of solidarity that would stand them in good stead when facing the demands of management in their future shop-floor jobs. This resistance perspective was subsequently applied to young people on the vocational courses and training schemes that were introduced in the context of rising levels of youth unemployment in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s (see Riseborough 1993).
