Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs

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Routledge, Oct 3, 2017 - Business & Economics - 215 pages
This book which has now established itself as a classic study of working class boys describes how Paul Willis followed a group of 'lads' as they passed through the last two years of school and into work. The book explains that for 'the lads' it is their own culture which blocks teaching and prevents the realisation of liberal education aims. This culture exposes some of the contradictions within these formal aims and actually supplies the operational criteria by which a future in wage labour is judged. Paul Willis explores how their own culture can guide working class lads on to the shop floor. This is an uncompromising book which has provoked considerable discussion and controversy in educational circles throughout the world - it has been translated into Finnish, German, French, Swedish, Japanese and Spanish.
 

Contents

Elements of a culture
11
Class and institutional form of a culture
52
Labour power culture class and institution
89
Penetrations
119
Limitations
145
The role of ideology
160
Notes towards a theory of cultural forms and social reproduction
171
Monday morning and the millennium
185
Index
200
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