Discuss how Paul Willis has examined the purpose of education in Learning to Labour (1977). You must direct your response to issues in Education Studies.

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Discuss how Paul Willis has examined the purpose of education. You must direct your response to issues in Education Studies.

Real or fictitious, we are instantly drawn to characters that possess similar qualities to our own, such as personality traits or life experiences or maybe even physical characteristics. Quite often we feel we relate to that individual in a personal way. It makes a biographical or back story line that much more interesting. For these reasons, the story of Paul Willis has appealed to me a great deal. Due to this enhanced and enthusiastic curiosity, I have thoroughly enjoyed researching for the following essay that you are about to read.

On occasion similar individuals come into direct contact. ‘Learning to Labour (1977)’ by Paul Willis was critically acclaimed for his ethnographic account of the lives of twelve white working class boys floundering their way through the British education system. Willis related to these boys, and it was reciprocated back to him, perhaps making it the reason it was such a success.

With this essay, I intend to explore the ways in which Willis analysed the intention of education. Drawing on his experiences, four key themes will be examined, with a fifth deep-rooted in an underlying manner throughout this paper. Firstly, with Willis displaying a typically Marxist viewpoint, I will investigate the ways in which he scrutinizes the cultures and cultural constructs within the whole schooling experience. His work was monumental but it did have its criticisms. Secondly, what are the effects of social class on individual education? Is there an escape from the restrictions of class via education? Can Paul Willis personally relate to this subject? Thirdly, what does Willis say about the development of sub-cultures within education? Focussing on the white working-class, Paul Willis examines particular factors within an educational setting that have an adverse effect and thus, cause the creation of non-conformist sub-cultures. For the fourth theme, I have opted to philosophize about the psychology behind Paul Willis’ results and the influence it has on education today. Why was ‘Learning to Labour’ such a landmark study? For the fifth theme, personal motivation is the underlying motif that is laced through the entire subject matter. I challenge the reader to consider this during the reading of this paper and also to contemplate the power of personal motivation in regards to each of the four key themes.  

Paul Willis examines the purpose of education by ethnographically immersing himself into a particular culture in which he wishes to study. This type of qualitative research methodology was paramount to the success of his book ‘Learning to Labour (1977)’. Willis is all too aware of the importance of culture in the construction and continuation of individual identity no matter what the institution, as shown by his writing in ‘The Ethnographic Imagination’: ‘human beings are driven not only to struggle to survive by making and remaking their material conditions of existence, but also to survive by making sense of the world and their place in it. This is a cultural production, as making sense of themselves as actors in their own cultural worlds. Cultural practices of meaning-making are intrinsically self-motivated as aspects of identity-making and self-construction: in making our cultural worlds we make ourselves (2000, p.5)’. Willis compares his form of study to simply becoming an ‘actor’ or ‘character’ within the ‘stage production’ of the subject’s cultural world. The ‘lads’ (the pseudonym of the twelve boys that he studied) related to Paul Willis on a personal level. They regarded him as one of their own, a different type of character to the adults they viewed as authoritative and restrictive (teachers, head teacher etc.): ‘Cos you’d been close to us and we’d have listened to you as one of us...you know what I mean. What we needed was someone like us who was just older, more responsibility (1977, p.197)’. Social dialogue and interconnected relationships such as this can only be truly achieved through effective ethnographical practice. Willis knows this is vital to true and honest self-expression and this is where the strength of his writings lay: ‘only by expressing themselves over time do human beings continuously reproduce themselves culturally. This process of labour requires, assumes and reproduces a locating cultural world through which self-expression is achieved (2000, p.9)’.

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Coming from a working class, single-parent family based in the estates of Wolverhampton, it is obvious that Willis’ personal commitments and empathy for the ‘lads’ are a definite influence on his work. Do they negatively influence or perhaps, limit his work though? Bessett and Gualtieri in their article ‘Paul Willis and the Scientific Imperative: An Evaluation of Learning to Labour (2002)’, assess the strengths and weaknesses of the in-depth ethnographic approach. Paul Willis’s work has its criticisms. ‘One comes from the subfield of sociology of education (Macleod 1987)(p.74)’. ‘Jay Macleod argues that Willis’s sampling prevents him from isolating the structural ...

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