ABSTRACT
The central official activity of school life is without doubt ‘work’. School rituals, pedagogical orientations, examinations, and careers are all geared to its production. Yet we have no direct studies of what this phenomenon ‘work’ means to teachers and pupils. There are several that make certain official assumptions about pupil categories,1 which means we do not know how central they are; some that take a true ethnographic approach, but mainly with counter-cultural groups, whose main aim and activity is in the avoidance of work and its replacement;2 and some that are connected with the approaches to it.3 In all of them, the central experience (if indeed there is one) seems to be taken for granted.
