Tristram Hooley

I’ve just struggled my way through Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour. I say struggled because this is a pretty heavy theoretical read, but also because I oscillated between finding it fascinating and being deeply annoyed by it. I’ll try and explain why the book provoked this dual reaction in me, but first I’ll try and fill in the basics of Willis’ argument.

Learning to Labour is subtitled ‘How working class kids get working class jobs’ and it sets out to explain how people take their path from school to work. Willis argues that kids from working class backgrounds move willingly, even enthusiastically, into jobs at the bottom of the economy that offer little possibility for either job satisfaction or advancement. Willis would argue that this process of people moving into poorly paid and unsatisfying jobs is an essential condition of capitalism. However, he explores why the wage slaves march into this situation as happily as they do. Willis bases his ethnographic study on the transition from school to work of twelve lads at a Midlands school.

At the centre of Willis’ book are a small group of lads. The lads don’t like the formal curriculum at school, they misbehave, sit at the back of the class, cheek their teacher and indulge in petty crime when the opportunity arises. The lads represent what Willis calls a counter-school culture. This counter-school culture is a kind of resistance that enables them to make it through school without absorbing its ideological values. Instead it creates its own ideology based on machismo, fetishisation of manual work and a complete disregard for learning in the sense understood by the school. Willis goes on to argue that the counter-school culture fulfils the function of smoothing the transition of the lads into shop floor culture. Their ability to survive and resist the school culture then becomes their ability to resist and survive in capitalism. On one hand their attitudes limit them and reduce the (very limited) possibility of social mobility afforded by education, but on the other hand, buying into the counter-school culture is the beginning of a strategy that will enable them to survive in the drudgery of the shop floor.

One thing that we should remember when reading Willis is that the book was written in 1977. Just as Frank Parsons or Donald Super are products of their time, Willis’ structuralism and discussion of a homogonous blue collar labour market are also deeply linked to the historical circumstances in which he was writing. Nonetheless Willis’ work has more than historical interest. The counter-school culture he describes is very much still with us and many young people are still opting to move into bottom of the economy with minimal violence required from the state. Willis’ book grapples with these issues in a creative and highly articulate way. His ability to draw connections between the sub-culture of young people and the wider political economy is extremely thought provoking.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that I waxed lyrical about a book called The Milltown Boys Revisted. The Milltown Boys Revisited covers very similar ground to Learning to Labour, but for my money is a more convincing read. Willis’ Learning to Labour builds a much more elaborate theoretical construct on top of the data that is unearthed by the ethnography. Willis makes a lot of bold claims about the way in which the counter-school culture operates and also what its significance is that I couldn’t help but feel were not really supported by the data he had. It raises a lot of interesting questions but doesn’t really chase these questions down sufficiently. Willis also looks briefly at other groups of young people e.g. disaffected youths in middle class schools, engaged youths in working class schools, different ethnicities and girls. All of these throw open huge questions that I recognise can’t be dealt with in this book, but by avoiding them Willis makes it difficult to feel that his conclusions would hold up. For example, how do engaged boys in working class schools make the transition into work in comparison to the disaffected? Does it actually make any difference in terms of destination, job satisfaction, integration into the shop floor culture and advancement. Willis does discuss these things but I didn’t feel that he really had the data to back it up.

Perhaps the thing that I found most difficult was Willis’ discussion of resistance. His argument that the counter-school culture is a form of resistance against an alien ideology seems right to me. However, as Willis discusses it is also an enormously self-defeating one. The lads who subscribe to the counter-school culture are, for the most part, condemning themselves to a life at the bottom of the economy. They realise the unfairness of this and struggle with this idea themselves. However Willis doesn’t really give any space to consideration of alternative forms of resistance. He does discuss the attempt by the teachers to use “progressive” teaching techniques to come up with an educational paradigm that is less confrontational, but he doesn’t look at other modes or discourses of resistance that might exist amongst any of the students. This may be because they are not there in the classroom (which I doubt) but it is certain that there are alternatives within the shop floor culture. Willis explores how counter-school culture interacts with the hierarchical formation of the factory, but does not look at how it interacts with the alternative structures that undoubtedly (in 1977) existed through the trade union organisation.

Willis’ work is a welcome alternative to an extreme structuralism that sees people as merely being shepherded by the economic conditions around them. His subjects demonstrate creativity and agency in the pursuit of their own aims. Nonetheless their aims ultimately strengthen and reinforce existing structures.  However this study remains within the confines of education and work and fails to explore the wider identity that these young people are likely to build for themselves in a host of different spheres (work, leisure, political activity, sub-culture, music etc). I would also have liked it to look wider and to draw in other types of young people in order to give it a broad enough perspective to really answer the question as to why working class kids get working class jobs.

This was my first ICG conference and I very much enjoyed it and learnt a huge amount. My feeling was that there were three main themes that underpinned the conference and I thought I’d use the rest of this blog to speculate on these a little.

Firstly there were discussions around practioner issues. How do we engage with clients with faith? How can Connexions’ advisers engage with schools? What should we advise clients about doing a foundations degree? etc etc. These aspects of the conference were much like other practioner conferences that I’ve attended. Some sessions were excellent, others less so, but all clearly chimed into the actual concerns of careers workers.

The second stand of the conference was based around speculation and star gazing on what the future policy environment would be. The presence of David Willets fuelled the “what will the Tories do” guessing games that everyone is playing at the moment. Willets was extremely convincing, demonstrating a strong understanding of guidance and keying into the messages that his audience wanted to hear (yes to independence, yest to an all age guidance service  and so on). He also made some interesting comments about the granularity of online labour market data that warmed the heart of my inner geek. However it was clear that Willets and the Tories were likely to end up stretching the same (or less) resource across a wider range of functions. It was also clear that they were proposing some pretty extensive reorganisaton and reconfiguration of the sector and I’ve got some doubts as to whether this is really what the sector needs. Nonetheless time will undoubtedly tell and it is very possible that what happens ultimately bears scant resemblance to the policy discussion that is currently going on.

The final strand that stretched across the ICG conference was around the professionalisation of the guidance profession. The way in which guidance professional are trained is a remarkably contentious issue. Some have a level 4 NVQ while others have a postgraduate certificate which is very like the PGCE that teachers undertake. Different factions have different opinions about the relative merits of these different qualifications. The situation is further complicated by the fact that there are a large range of people (like myself) who are swimming in these waters unencumbered by any relevant qualification but who have a wide range of relevant experience.

So what to do? The ICG is in a bind. On the one hand it would like to campaign for guidance to be a graduate or even postgraduate profession. On the other hand it would like to be open, drawing in those with NVQ4 and engaging them in its professional development activity without suggesting that they are in any way lesser members of the profession because they don’t have a degree. Furthermore the ICG would like to engage those who have come into the careers world through other routes (teachers, learning technologists, HR specialists, researchers and coaches). It would like to do this grow the size and expertise of the organisation and to retain its leadership of the sector. However, it needs to tread carefully so that it doesn’t accidentally put out the message that anyone can do guidance and that qualifications aren’t important.

It seems reasonable to me to argue that the high level and mixed bag of skills that go into creating a careers profession are likely to be brought about by some kind of training and that that training probably needs to be at a graduate level. Which is not to say that some of the role couldn’t be delivered with less training, but rather that high level engagement with people’s decision making requires understand of psychology, sociology, education and the labour market at a level that would fit into a degree type of qualification relatively well. Whether this ultimately delivers a two tier profession is an interesting question that I think the ICG will need to explore further. And none of this has answered the question of what you do about all of the untrained interlopers. Do you close them out, find a way to co-exist or require everyone to accredit their skills through the professional body?

How all of this pans out will depend in part on how the ICG and other organisations play it. It will also depend on how the government see the role the guidance profession and whether it is something that is supported and developed (or not). So where next for professionalisation of guidance? And where next for the ICG in formulating and delivering on its vision around these issues? Deirdre Hughes (my predecessor at iCeGS) made a strong start on this with the launch of the CREATE campaign. It will be interesting to see where this goes next.     

Did anyone see C4’s comedy showcase Campus the other night? I thought that it was pretty amusing but was a bit disappointed that it didn’t really capture the sense of what working in a university is like. Inevitably the show only has a few characters who are spread through a variety of academic and support departments. Where I think it gets it wrong is that they all know each other. The sense of looming bureaucracy and competing tribes and departments is missing, which is a shame as I’m sure there is a lot of comedy in this. If they ever make another episode I’ll watch and see if it improves.

If you are looking for university based humour you should make sure you check out the flawless A Very Peculiar Practice. Although a little dated it still captures the experience of university as workplace better than anything else I’ve seen.

Any other suggestions?

Since the release of Quality, Choice and Aspiration - A Strategy for Young People's Information, Advice and Guidance there has been a lot of debate in the media about the appropriate age to start careers education. This seems bizarre to me because I feel that learning about career is simply part of our normal educational and developmental growth. What is more it starts earlier than key stage two and continues throughout your entire life.

We might reductively describe careers education as being concerned with two main elements

• Understanding yourself, your abilities and desires
• Understanding the labour market and the opportunities within it

It is my belief that children are engaged in both of these pretty much from birth.

If we take the first element, that of understanding yourself, it is pretty clear that this is one of the main educational aims that children have. Working out what and who they like and how to get more of it is what children do. This drive to explore identity and find a place in the world drives children’s learning and provides a context within which adults interventions in their development can be meaningful. As a parent or an educator we are normally in the process of trying to expand children’s horizons.

“Try it, you might like it”

“But why do you like pink so much?”

At the same time as helping children to explore and understand the world, parents and educators are in the business of providing opportunities that develop actual or perceived aptitudes.

“He’s very good at football. Do you think that we should get him a coach?”

For children development is a process of self-realisation that can be supported through education of various kinds. The way in which an individual’s identity is constructed in these early years is likely to have profound implications for their personal journey through learning and career.

The second aspect of career education is rather more controversial. At what age should we start teaching about the labour market? Again my answer to this question would be that children begin to explore the labour market almost from birth. First they differentiate between individuals (Mummy, Daddy, Nanny, Grandad) before going on to work out that these are also social roles and that other children also possess Mummies etc. Rapidly other roles are added to this (police officer, shop keeper, doctor etc) along with the realisation that parents often go off to a place that is called “work”. This making sense of the world is essentially a process of building up labour market information and occupational profiles even if most of us would not usually describe it as such.

This process of gaining an understanding of the labour market is well supported by resources. My children watch a programme called Me Too which essentially provides information about a range of occupations through stories and song. When I was a child I watched Mr Benn which essentially fulfilled a similar function. Explaining to me that there were a range of occupations and giving insights into what they did (knights fight dragons etc). There are also loads of books that provide similar learning for children see for example Richard Scarry’s What do people do all day. I’d be interested in hearing about other resources that people have found that offer career learning for very young children.

Learning about the labour market is just part of learning about the world around you. To close this off to children is to fail in their education. So let’s make sure that career education is done well, that it is emancipatory and encourages the raising of aspirations and challenges to social and economic norms – but let’s also make sure that it is a lifelong process that supports learning and working lives from cradle to grave.