Learning To Labor By Paul Willis: Ethological Analysis

This paper is going to focus on Learning to Labor by Paul Willis through an ethnographic analyses. While discussing the attributes of this ethnography, I will also be analyzing and breaking down his methodology which doing research and fieldwork. I will also go on to define some of the key terms used through this ethnography and the relevancy of their impact tot his writing. Willis explores the lives of “lads” (high school students who are in the working class) and the relationship in the environment created between education and their social status through the perspectives of the working class lifestyles. I plan to look at Willis’s methodology, participant observation study as well as some of the terms that Willis choose to use. At its core,

(as quoted previously from my proposal). I am excited to read this book because Paul Willis is a well-respected anthropologist who is known by this book. I don’t have a lot of experience with traditional ethnographies, besides any readings we have done here in this class. I wanted to include thoughts before the in depth analysis because I wanted to state my initial thoughts then be able to wrap up with my final thoughts without any confusion about what I read before versus what I read after. One of my larger interests in this book is the back that Paul Willis is working with younger people. In Student Affairs, I work with college age students everyday. In the fieldwork that I have done, I have also worked with just college age students (ages 18-25). I am very curious to learn about his methodology and how he undertook the task of working with a younger age group where so much development

1. This research focused on a group of “lads” (they will be defined further along in the paper) in 1970’s who rejected school and all of the values that came along with it. It focused on leaving schooling as quickly as they could.

a. While they were in school, the lads did whatever they could to disrupt class or mess around to be free of any control the school pushed on them.

i. This is the development of the anti-school culture (counter school culture).

1. Anti-school culture (counter school culture): disrupting lessons, playing up to teachers and breaking as many rules as possible as their way of getting back at the system which has labeled them as failures.

2. Willis’s work addresses the flaws and weak points in Marxist approaches to education.

a. Willis argued that the lads he observed we deliberately failing themselves in recognition that manual labor awaited them in their future.

i. Willis showed that the education system was failing to produce ideal complaint workers for the capitalist system.

1. The lads “counter school culture” contained some perceptive insights into the nature of capitalism for