Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs » (1st Edition)

Paul Willis is professor in the department of social and cultural studies and Head of the Media and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Wolverhampton, England.

Hailed by the New Society as the "best book on male working class youth," this classic work, first published in 1977, has been translated into several foreign languages and remains the authority in ethnographical studies.

Stanley Aranowitz

The unique contribution of this book is that it shows, with glittering clarity, how the rebellion of poor and working class kids against school authority prepares them for working class jobs.No American interested in education or in labor can afford not to read and study this book carefully.

1. Introduction
The Hammertown case study
Part 1 Ethnography
2. Elements of a culture
Opposition to authority and rejection of the conformist
The informal group
Dossing, blagging and wagging
Having a laff
Boredom and excitement
Sexism
Racism
3. Class and institutional form of a culture
Class form
Institutional form
4. Labour power, culture, class and institution
Official provision
Continuities
Jobs
Arriving
Part II Analysis
5. Penetrations
Elements of analysis
Penetrations
6. Limitations
Divisions
Labor power and patriarchy
Racialism and labour power
7. The role of Ideology
Confirmation
Dislocation
The internal interlocutor
8. Notes towards a theory of cultural forms and social reproduction
Reproduction and state institutions
9. Monday morning and the millennium