ABSTRACT
One of the central concerns of the sociology of education since its inception has been to document the nature of educational opportunities, inequalities and patterns of social reproduction. However, it was not until the 1970s with the theoretical development of interpretive approaches that young people’s subjective orientations to education first became a major concern of research. Since then, the study of pupil cultures or young people’s perspectives towards education has been a developing field, whereby not only have theoretical perspectives developed in terms of sophistication, but they have helped to document the changing nature of young people’s cultural responses to the major shifts that have occurred in educational and occupational contexts over the past few decades.
Early work on subjective orientations to education can be traced back to Werthman (1963) in the United States, who rather than coming from an educational perspective was working within the discipline of the sociology of deviance. His study of urban gangs in America challenged the traditional sociological view of the time that delinquent working-class pupils faced a problem of a monolith of middle-class norms and values against which they fared badly. Instead, he argued that gang members’ responses within the classroom were predicated on the perceived fairness of individual teachers in response to individual grades. In this respect, behaviour or delinquency in school was perceived as both variable between teachers and one that appeared predicated on a perceived sense of social injustice. In the UK, early interest in educational subjectivities stemmed from the influential
work of Hargreaves (1967) and Lacey (1970) and their social systems approach. They argued that the emergence of different pupil subjectivities within the school could be understood by differentiation and polarization theory. Hargreaves, for example, following the re-organization of schooling along comprehensive lines, highlighted how
streaming of ability within the school (differentiation) influenced teachers’ perceptions and interactions with pupils, which in turn led to the emergence of two polarized pupil subcultures that he labelled ‘academic’ and ‘delinquescent’ Those within the academic subculture were seen as orientated to the values of the school and the teachers while the ‘delinquescent’ held polar opposite values that were negatively orientated. Prior to this, there had been limited research into the study of young people’s sub-
jective responses to education, but the emergence of new interpretative approaches within the sociology of education led to a bourgeoning field of empirical study into pupil cultures located within the confines of the school. This was most evident during the 1970s when a number of influential studies highlighted patterns of cultural resistance particularly among working-class youth. One strand of this work focused on the institutional frameworks of the school and was primarily descriptive, with its focus on micro level processes within and outwith the classroom. This further developed the early work of Hargreaves and the way in which the organization of schooling, through allocating pupils to different bands or streams, led to the development of pro-and anti-school cultures. The other strand of work took this a step further, and while it also adopted an ethnographic approach, tried to connect the micro processes observed among young people to a broader macro framework. This line of work is mostly commonly associated with Paul Willis and his classic study, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, which remains an important reference text to this day, but also Corrigan’s study of working-class males in the North-east of England (Willis 1977; Corrigan 1979). Willis’s study differed in many respects from the earlier studies into young people’s
subjective responses to education. Although working with a Marxist tradition, he took a critical stance against other more deterministic theories, such as the work of Bowles and Gintis (1976), and argued that structural forces are mediated through the cultural sphere. In doing so, he placed a strong emphasis on young people’s agency and shared how a group of working-class young people (the ‘lads’) were not failed by the school, teachers or social system, but actively sought to fail themselves. Willis explained the oppositional cultural resistance that characterized the lads’ response to schooling as a collective response, one that sees through and penetrates, if only partially, the conditions of the working class under capitalism. As their chances of upward mobility within the system are negligible, they may as well reject educational conformity as it offered few or no rewards, and instead they may as well have a ‘laff’ and display their open hostility to the school and teachers. Willis argued the counter school culture they adopted tended to mirror that of the shop-floor culture with its strong emphasis on masculinity, but one that was also an aspect of wider working-class culture more generally, something that served to prepare them for the world of dead-end work. While Willis’s work was widely acclaimed, it has been subject to detailed criticism, in
particular in relation to its romantic portrayal of the ‘lads’, its uncritical stance in relation to macho culture, and for downplaying working-class students who do not adopt strong forms of resistance to the dominant ideology of the school. Brown (1987), coming from a Weberian perspective, in a later ethnography, identified greater plurality of young people’s subjective orientations to the school. In particular, he highlighted a further group of pupils the ‘ordinary’ kids, working-class young people who held an alienated but instrumental attitude toward the school. He was particularly critical of Willis’s portrayal of the ‘lads’ as the normal working-class response to school and argued his analysis was flawed, as it failed to explain why large numbers of working-class kids did not reject school.
