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

-- George E. Marcus

This particular subject matter is surely outdated, even in England itself as the education system there has (mostly) moved away from a focus on dividing kids by class, then doing nothing for the 'problem' kids but preparing them for menial jobs in industry. However, there is much to think about concerning the larger issues that Willis raises, especially the rigid tendencies of the class system (not just in England), and the methods used by those at the bottom to cope with a system they probably will not be able to get out of. The 'analysis' section of the book gets a bit sluggish as Willis performs the required ivory-tower application of theories to the findings he collected while sojourning with the working class kids. The predictable treatise on Marxist theories of labor and capital gets especially tiresome, though otherwise Willis still manages to keep the theory section mostly interesting, as he builds on crucial insights into class structures and the dark side of industrial society. All this from hanging with a bunch of rowdy and potty-mouthed British schoolkids. ...


A landmark effort at synthesizing theoretical frameworks   February 6, 2002
 14 out of 20 found this review helpful

I use Willis' work every semester in my graduate level educational research methods class. It is one of first and
most influential efforts to bring together a marxist focus on macro-social dynamics, a symbolic interactionist focus on micro-social interactions, and a phenomenological focus on individual consicousness into a single study of class reproduction. It is a classic in every sense.


Still The Best Ethnography in Sociology   September 3, 2001
 26 out of 27 found this review helpful

I came to Dr. Willis's Learning To Labor as a Ph.D. student at York University, Toronto. I was profoundly moved both theoretically and personally. Willis gives us a theoretical way of articulating macro and micro perspectives which shows how the two arise in dialectical fashion, e.g. class determines the working class lives of the lads through the very choices of the lads themselves! It was, and still is, a brilliant insight and contribution in relation to ongoing discussions of structure/agency and the whole question of determinism. Dr. Willis's work also touched base with my own life. I grew up in a cotton mill town in South Carolina. The local school was closely tied to the local manufacturing plants and the surrounding working-class, both in the fields and the mills. I saw the life of the lads as nearly identical with the life of the white, working class kids that I went to school with. Most of my high school friends saw going to college as a "waste of time" and for "sissies". Real work required real men! Most ended up in the local cotton mills. Many of these young men had promising lives that could have been realized, but at those structural moments choices were made that reproduced the local working-class. I have since written my own ethnographic work (Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000) and I have to say that Dr. Willis's work was always a big help and resource for thinking through the relationship between reproduction and resistance. A must read for anyone on the verge of ethnographic research and for the general reader as well.


How outdated research Get outdated reviews   May 30, 2000
 3 out of 76 found this review helpful

I thought this book was very outdated and hard to read because of the English accent Willis uses. The research was OK but a little bias against working class ( poor and broke)kids.