Paul Willis: Learning to Labour (1977)

Last Updated on October 20, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Learning to Labour (1977) is an ethnographic study by Paul Willis of 12 white working-class boys – ‘the lads’ – at a boys’ secondary modern school in a Midlands industrial town, which Willis called ‘Hammertown’. Willis used participant observation, group discussions and interviews to describe and understand the counter-school culture the lads formed while at school.

Willis studied the lads intensively during their last two years at school, starting in their penultimate year when they were about 15, and then spent short periods observing each of them at work after they left. He also studied five other groups of working-class boys from schools in and around Hammertown, less intensively, to compare with the main group.

He applied a neo-Marxist framework to explain why these working-class lads went on to get working-class jobs – the question in the book’s subtitle, How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs.

Willis recognised as legitimate the boys’ own interpretation of school as an institution which was irrelevant to their lives as 15–16 year olds, because they didn’t need qualifications to move into the manual work they perceived as superior to academic work.

However, while rational in one sense, the counter-school culture they formed, which resisted the power of the school, in the end led to what he called their ‘self-damnation’: their own choices to spend their time ‘having a laff’ by confronting school authority resulted in them achieving no qualifications and having no choice other than to move into working-class jobs, which meant class inequality was reproduced despite their class consciousness.

The Lads and the Counter-School Culture

In the first half of the book Willis mostly describes the counter-school culture the lads formed.

Willis used participant observation and group discussions to study the lads over a long period, and he was thus able to produce a rich or thick description of their ‘antics’, their banter and their attitudes towards school and future work, providing an in-depth account of their own interpretation of their lives within the counter-school culture they formed.

The counter-school culture was one of rebellion against school rules and focused on disrupting school life, with status being gained within the group for ‘bad behaviour’ such as not doing homework, disrupting lessons, playing pranks on teachers, and harassing conformist students.

The lads strongly identified against the school and the fact that it valued academic work and non-manual, or mental, labour more highly than the manual labour they saw as real work and more appropriate for real men.

The lads identified against conformist students, whom they called the ‘ear’oles’ and derided as feminine or gay, and the lads were also homophobic.

The lads smoked and had sex with girls, and being known to be sexually active was important in their culture, which was patriarchal and sexist and excluded girls. The counter-school culture was also racist, as non-whites were excluded too and the lads made common use of racist language against ethnic minorities.

While the lads did truant, they mostly preferred being at school because it was such a laff, and the disruptive behaviours which confronted authority built a sense of shared identity and solidarity.

When they left school, most of the lads went into the manual jobs they wanted and perceived as empowering.

How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs

In the second half of the book Willis develops a theoretical analysis of how working-class kids go on to get working-class jobs, and the role the counter-school culture plays in this process.

Willis accepted the lads’ own interpretation of their counter-school culture as a form of resistance to school authority, but it also led to what he called their self-damnation, as it ultimately laid the foundation for their acceptance of their subordinate role in capitalist society in lower-paid, manual work.

The counter-school culture reflected the working-class culture the lads came from, and it mirrored the shop-floor culture of many manual workplaces. Being part of it played a role in the reproduction of class inequality, helping to explain why working-class kids went on to working-class jobs!

Willis saw the counter-school culture as a distorted version of class consciousness: it resisted the authorities of capitalism but was short-lived and never amounted to anything that would help improve the lads’ subordinate position in the capitalist system.

The counter-school culture emerges from working-class culture and helps the lads understand some of the injustices of capitalism, but it also offers a limited framework of understanding, rooted in the immediate gratification of having a laff, which prevents them from developing effective resistance.

Penetration and Limitation

Two concepts Willis developed to understand the lads’ world view were penetration and limitation.

He argued that the lads had legitimate insights into the truth of their own class position (‘penetrations’), such as recognising that the school was a middle-class institution designed primarily to help middle-class kids into middle-class jobs in exchange for their conformity, of which they were having none!

However, their penetrations were limited by blocks and distractions that stopped them blossoming into a full, effective, radical class consciousness (‘limitations’):

• Their culture was more emotional than intellectual. It was all about the buzz of having a laugh, not serious resistance that was going to go any further.
• It was also a means to accomplish a masculine identity, and in embracing patriarchy and traditional gender divisions of labour, they also limited their capacity to build effective resistance.

Schools Play a Role in Ideological Control

Schools play a nuanced role in performing the function of ideological control in capitalist society.

By operating as middle-class institutions and serving the needs of middle-class students, focusing on academic qualifications relevant to middle-class jobs, they make working-class rebellion more likely. Hence they are unintentionally complicit in the counter-school culture emerging.

The counter-school culture then does the rest – the lads ‘choose to fail’ and the school isn’t to blame, at least at the surface level of reality, but deeper down it is, because it is failing to meet the needs of working-class students who do not want middle-class academic jobs.

Criticisms of Learning to Labour

Angela McRobbie (1980) included Willis in her feminist critique of subcultural studies, which she argued focused almost entirely on boys and young men and paid little attention to girls and young women.

Lee Harvey points out that Willis’s treatment of racial divisions is underdeveloped – he notes the lads’ racism but doesn’t integrate race into his analysis in the way he does with class and gender.

Willis’s methodology is not always clear, which raises questions of reliability. It is unclear for much of the time which specific contexts Willis was in, and the exact nature of the group discussions isn’t always specified.

The main group of 12 lads is a small sample, raising issues of representativeness – although Willis did compare them with five other groups of working-class boys.

This is a difficult study to repeat and validate, given the amount of time it took, the depth of it and the special access Willis had.

How Willis Comes Up in the Exam

Willis is useful in two places on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1). In the Education section, he is the main neo-Marxist on the role of education and a key study for pupil subcultures: use him to criticise traditional Marxists such as Bowles and Gintis for seeing pupils as passive, while still showing how school reproduces class inequality. In the methods in context question, he is a classic example of participant observation in a school, with all the practical and ethical problems that brings.

For the wider debate, see the Marxist perspective on education and Bowles and Gintis’ correspondence principle, which Willis was responding to.

Focus on Research Methods

Learning to Labour by Paul Willis (1977) is an ethnographic study of twelve working-class ‘lads’ from a school in a Midlands industrial town. Willis studied the lads intensively over their last two years at school and then observed them at work. The study set out to explain how and why working-class kids get working-class jobs, using a wide range of qualitative research methods, from interviews and group discussions to participant observation, aiming to understand participants’ actions from the participants’ point of view in everyday contexts.

Participant Observation in the Context of Education

Given the practical and ethical problems of conducting participant observation in a school setting, there are only a handful of such studies which have been carried out in the UK, and these are mainly historical, done a long time ago. They are, nonetheless, interesting as examples of research. Below I consider one classic participant observation study in the context of education – Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1977).

Sampling

Willis concentrated on a particular group of boys in a non-selective secondary school in the Midlands, who called themselves ‘lads’. They were all white. The school was predominantly working class in intake.

Alongside the main group, Willis studied five comparison groups less intensively: two groups of conformist boys and three groups of non-conformist boys from other schools in and around Hammertown, including grammar schools and a comprehensive.

Data Collection

Willis attended classes as a member of the class rather than as a teacher, including careers classes. He also had long taped conversations with the parents of the 12 ‘lads’, senior teachers and careers officers, and he used regular group discussions, informal interviews and diaries. After the lads left school he spent short periods of participant observation with each of them at work, and interviewed their foremen, managers and shop stewards. NB He also made extensive use of unstructured interviews, but here we’re focusing on the observation aspects.

Participant observation allowed Willis to immerse himself in the social settings of the lads and gave him the opportunity to ask the lads (typically open) questions about their behaviour that day or the night before, encouraging them to explain themselves in their own words… which included detailed accounts of the lads fighting, getting into trouble with teachers and bunking lessons.

Practical Issues with Learning to Labour

The research was very time-consuming – intensive fieldwork over two school years, followed by time spent in the lads’ workplaces.

It would be very difficult to repeat this research today, given that it would be harder to gain access to schools (also see reliability).

Funding would also probably be out of the question today given the time taken and small sample size.

Ethical Issues with Learning to Labour

An ethical strength of the research is that it gives the lads a voice – these are lads who are normally ‘talked about’ as problems, and don’t effectively have a voice.

An ethical weakness is that Willis witnessed the lads getting into fights, their racism and homophobia, as well as them vandalising school property, but did nothing about it.

A second ethical weakness is the issue of confidentiality – with such a small sample size, it would be relatively easy for people who knew them to guess which lads Willis had been focusing on.

Theoretical Issues with Learning to Labour

Validity is widely regarded as being excellent because of the unstructured, open-ended nature of the research, allowing Willis to sensitively push the lads into giving in-depth explanations of their world view.

Critics have tried to argue that the fact he was obviously a researcher, and an adult, may have meant the lads played up, but he counters this by saying that no one can put on an act for that long – at some point you have to relax and be yourself.

Something which may undermine the validity is Willis’ interpretation of the data – he could have selected aspects of the immense amount of data he had to support his biased opinion of the boys.

Representativeness is poor – because the main sample is only 12, and they are only white boys.

Reliability is low – it is very difficult to repeat this research for the reasons mentioned under practical issues.

Signposting and Related Posts

This post was written primarily for students of A-level sociology, specifically focusing on the problems of researching in schools using participant observation, to get students thinking about the methods in context part of Paper 1 (7192/1).

However, the study is also relevant to the education topic more generally, and research methods.

You might also like this summary of more recent research on why the white working classes continue to underachieve in education.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources

• Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs.
• Harvey, L. (1990, 2011) Critical Social Research: Willis, Learning to Labour.
• McRobbie, A. (1980) Settling accounts with subcultures: a feminist critique. Screen Education.