I found Paul Willis' book Learning to Labor in the Florida State University library in the late '70's. At first glance the title and cover design suggested just another pointless exercise in vocational education, something David Snedden might have written if he were still breathing. As I began to read, I thought the first few pages were clumsily written and uninteresting. By the time I had gotten to page 100, however, I had come to see the world in a different way. For the first time I understood why I had behaved so badly in junior high and high school, why I had so little respect for the authority and curriculum of schooling, and why I took so much pleasure in being actively disruptive: the exchange relationship between me and schooling had been badly out of whack! Schools wanted hard work, deference to teachers and administrators, getting up early in the morning, and tolerance of awkward social situations. But what did they give in return? Little more than the promise of more schooling for those who wanted a reasonable payoff for their investments in education.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the really crucial insight offered by Learning to Labor. Once that point is made, everything else falls into place. Even on the factory floor, the same line of reasoning makes sense. Again, hard work, deference to authority, getting up early, and putting off having a good time until payday. But on payday employers are tight-fisted, niggardly, giving too little in exchange for too much. Workers are ripped off by limp-wristed suits who lack the masculine wherewithal to put in a physically demanding day of work. I heard the same thing from my Old Man working in the Pennsylvania coal regions.
I admit to being uncertain as to why Willis separated his ethnographic material so neatly from his theoretical presentation. Furthermore, the theoretical section seems to add little of real interest to the ethnographic account, and the concepts introduced by Willis, notably penetrations, limitations, and partial penetrations, seem to presume that the anti-school Lads were unselfconsciously much more politically sensitive and astute than seems plausible. Resistance? Big Deal. The Lads were just British versions of the guys I knew in the U.S.: sexist, racist, imbued with an ethos of exaggerated masculinity, and dismissive of authority. These were just the apolitical and otherwise disengaged friends I drank beer with every night.
I am also uncomfortable with the comparisons made in secondary literature between Learning to Labor and Bowles and Gintis' ostensibly too deterministic Schooling in Capitalist America. It always seemed to me that too much freedom was commonly attributed to Willis' Lads, and that they lived in a determined and determining context where the choices they made were the only ones they could have made. The Lads' rebellion against school authority, moreover, was manifest in conventional, commonplace, and unimaginative forms -- drinking, smoking, mode of dress, and being disruptive in ways that prompted laughter, the very same ones we had used in the U.S. Much later, I found it absurd that participants in academic conferences where Learning to Labor was receiving attention actually believed that the seeds of revolution were lying dormant in anti-school, Lad-like students who coalesced into like-minded peer groups.
Whatever my reservations, however, I recognize Learning to Labor as a brilliant ethnography. It changed forever the way I think about schooling and its social context, and it still actively informs my outlook.
The volume under review, Learning to Labor in New Times, seeks to take the full measure of Willis' 1977 masterpiece and situate it in the present day. The resulting essays range in quality from quite good to pointlessly obvious to abstractly arcane, and they include egregiously unsubstantiated claims as to the intra-familial brutality of working class men, going so far as to interpret talk that diminishes women as incontrovertible evidence of physical abuse. The last interpretation is applied even to he Lads and their fathers in Learning to Labor, a book that emphatically acknowledges patriarchy but makes absolutely no mention of physical abuse.
One of the virtues of Willis' classic was that he valued the people he studied for who they were. That same modesty and concern is missing from too many of the essays in Learning to Labor in New Times, and working class males are too often judged to be uncontrolled brutes, loathsome in their hostility toward women.
Yes, the shop floor, occupational destination of the Lads, no longer exists, at least not in Willis's Hammertown or, for that matter, in the company town where I grew up. It has fallen victim to internationalization, outsourcing, privatization, down-sizing, and technological innovation, all in pursuit of reduced labor costs and increased levels of surplus value. Everyone knows this, and the consequences for prospective Lads are the primary issues. And there we find the main deficiency of this very disappointing book: only two chapters, Kenway and Kraack's "Reordering Work and Destabilizing Masculinity" and Nolan and Anyon's "Learning to Do Time" deal directly, insightfully, and at length with this all-important set of circumstances. Odd, indeed.
I readily acknowledge that cultural studies are not something to which I have given a lot of attention, meaning that I may not appreciate Willis' theoretical work and may not understand why some of the essays in Learning to Labor in New Times seem only obliquely related to Learning to Labor. However, until I retired a year or so ago I taught a course in the sociology of education. After reading Learning to Labor, students' first question, one that bespoke real interest, was where do prospective Lads go now? Sadly, answering that question is not what Learning to Labor in New Times is about.
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