Paul Willis is a British sociologist. Willis was born in Wolverhampton and studied at Birmingham and Cambridge universities. Paul Willis is a leading British cultural theorist. He was a Professor of Social/Cultural Ethnography at Keele University. His most famous book entitled “Learning to labour” was a series of observations and interviews in a school, which was created to discover why working class children get working class jobs.
Paul Willis studied a group of 12 working-class boys during their last year and a half in school and their first few months at work. He conducted a series of interviews and observations within a school, with the aim of discovering why ‘working class kids get working class jobs’.
He identified two groups of pupils as the ‘lads’ and the ‘ear ‘oles’.
The ‘lads’ were working class boys who expressed a negative attitude to academic work and also showed strongly racist and sexist attitudes. They tried to drink and smoke to become part of a more adult world and thought that manual work, such as building, was far more important to mental work. Seeing as society is run by capitalism, the lads recognised that there was no such thing as an equal opportunity for them, as no matter how hard they tried, they would still remain far less successful than middle class students. This links to the Marxist idea that there is no meritocracy in a capitalist society.
One of the main motivations for the lad’s rejecting their education would be the ear’oles.
The ear’oles were seen as school conformists by the lads and were the complete opposite to them when it came to academic progress. Ear ‘oles were looked down on by the lads as they were the children who followed the school rules, respected their teachers, and commited to their education. Lads did not just dislike ear’oles, they felt they had superiority over them. This was because the lads believed that the ear’oles were wasting their time at school by not being able to have fun or be independent.
Willis found a number of similarities between the attitudes and behaviour developed by the lads in school and those on a shop floor at work. Having a laugh was important in both situations as a means of dealing with boredom, authority and repetitiveness.
The lads rejected school and mentally prepared themselves for a place in the workforce invariably at manual level. They learned to put up with boredom, had a laugh and to basically accepted the labour of low-skill and low-pay jobs.
Courtesy of Lee Bryant, Director of Sixth Form, Anglo-European School, Ingatestone, Essex
