Learning to Labour

Paul Willis, a British social scientist and cultural theorist, wrote this 1977 study of how schooling and social class interact. It asks why children from working-class backgrounds so often end up in working-class jobs, and it looks at the part that school culture plays in that outcome.

Willis built the book on close fieldwork with a group of teenage boys at a secondary school in an industrial English town. He followed their daily routines, their friendships, and their open rejection of classroom authority, and he traced how their attitudes shaped the labour they went on to do. The work sits within cultural studies, placing everyday behaviour alongside broader questions of power and economic life.

The Morningside Edition, published by Columbia University Press in the United States, is a reissue made available shortly after the book's original reception. It is aimed at students and readers of education, sociology and cultural studies.