4.1 Evidence Flashcards
Role of Education
Learning to Labour
Paul Willis 1970s Marxist
Learning to labour is an ethnographic study of 12 working class white boys who attended one boys only secondary school which Willis called ‘Hammertown Boys’ in the Midlands in the early 1970s. Willis used a mixture of overt participant observation and group interviews to describe and understand the counter-school culture which the boys formed while at school.
Willis began his fieldwork in 1972 and followed the boys for six months in their second to last year of secondary school. He also interviewed them periodically up until 1976, by which time the boys had transitioned from school to work, most of them going into manual factory jobs.
He applied a neo-marxist framework to explain why these working class lads went on to get working class jobs.
Wills recognised as legitimate the boys’ own interpretation of school as an institution which was irrelevant to their lives as 15-16 year olds because they didn’t need qualifications to move into the manual work they perceived as superior to academic work.
However, while rational in one sense, the counter school culture they formed which resisted the power of the school in the end led to what he called their “self-damnation: their own choices to spend their time ‘having a laff’ by confronting school authority resulted in them achieving no qualifications and having no choice other than to move into working class jobs, which meant class inequality was reproduced despite their class consciousness.
Willis used participant observation and group interviews to study the lads over several years, and he was thus able to produce a rich or thick description of their ‘antics’, their banter and their attitudes towards school and future wok, providing an in-depth account of their own interpretation of their lives within the counter school culture they formed.
The counter school culture was one of rebellion against school rules and focused on disrupting school life, with status being gained within the group for ‘bad behaviour’ such as not doing homework, disrupting lessons, playing pranks on teachers, and harassing conformist students.
The lads strongly identified against the school and the fact that it valued academic work and non-manual, or mental labour more highly than the manual labour they saw as real work and more appropriate for real men.
The lads identified against conformist students who they derided as feminine or gay and the lads were also homophobic.
The lads smoked and had sex with girls, and being known to be sexually active was important in their culture which was patriarchal and sexist and excluded girls. The counter-school culture was also racist, as non-whites were excluded too and the lads made common usage of racial language against ethnic minorities.
While the lads did truant they mostly preferred being at school because it was such a laff and the disruptive behaviours which confronted authority built a sense of shared identity and solidarity. In fact the lads could have left school at 15 but they chose to stay on for an extra year!
By the end of the study in the autumn of 1976 most of the lads had gone into the manual jobs they wanted and perceived as empowering, including bricklaying, plumbing and machine work, and only one could not find a job.
Two concepts Willis developed to understand the lad’s world view were penetration and limitation.
He argued that the lads had legitimate insights into the truth of their own class position (‘penetrations’) such as recognising that the school was a middle class institution designed primarily to help middle class kids into middle class jobs in exchange for their conformity, of which they were having none!
However their penetrations were limited and failed to fully blossom into a full, effective, radical class consciousness:
Their culture was more emotional than intellectual. It was all about the buzz of having a laugh, not serious resistance that was going to go any further.
It was also a means to accomplish a masculine identity, and in embracing patriarchy and traditional gender divisions of labour, they also limited their capacity to build effective resistance.
Schools play a nuanced role in performing the function of ideological control in capitalist society.
By operating as middle class institutions and serving the needs of middle class students by focusing on academic qualifications relevant to middle class jobs they make working class rebellion more likely, hence they are unintentionally complicit in the counter school culture emerging.
The counter-school culture then does the rest – the lads ‘choose to fail’ and the school isn’t to blame, at least at the surface level of reality, but deeper down it is because it is failing to meet the needs of working class students who do not want middle class academic jobs.
Human Capital Theory
In the 1960s, economists Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz pointed out that education and training were investments that could add to productivity.
As the world accumulated more and more physical capital, the opportunity cost of going to school declined. Education became an increasingly important component of the workforce. The term was also adopted by corporate finance and became part of intellectual capital, and more broadly as human capital.
Intellectual and human capital are treated as renewable sources of productivity. Organizations try to cultivate these sources, hoping for added innovation or creativity. Sometimes, a business problem requires more than just new machines or more money.
Around the same time, Marxian economists Samuel Bowels and Herbert Gintis argued against the human capital theory, stating that turning people (i.e. labor) into capital essentially squashes arguments around class conflict and efforts to empower workers’ rights.
Human capital is a broad term that refers to the economic value of a person’s education, training, skills, and other experiences. While the theory is criticized for being too simplistic, many businesses are seeking to invest in the human capital of their employees in order to become more profitable.
somewhat similar to functionalism//investment in humans
