Transcript Lecture 11 Cultures of Resistance: Willis and Education 1

Lecture 11
Cultures of Resistance:
Willis and Education
1
Revision
• Ian Sutherland will be holding a review
session for the first semester
• on Friday May 25th from 3pm-5pm (Room
TBA)
• He will contact you by email (and posting a
note on his office door...313) to let you
know the room.
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Cultures of resistance
• Why do working class kids get working
class jobs?
• Willis on ‘learning to labour’;
• Educational attainment
• Youth sub-cultures,
• understanding cultural oppression,
creativity and resistance.
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Readings
• Reading: Saukko, Paula (2003) Doing research in cultural studies :
an introduction to classical and new methodological approaches.
London: SAGE, Chapter 2. http://www.sagepub.co.uk/upmdata/9516_010044ch2.pdf
• Studies:
• Paul Willis Profane Cultures 301.23 WIL
• Willis, Paul E. 1977 Learning to labour: how working class kids get
working class jobs Farnborough: Saxon House, 301.44 WIL
• Giddens, A. Sociology. 5ed. Chapter 17 on education.
• Diane Reay 2006 The Zombie Stalking English Schools: Social
Class and Educational Inequality British Journal of Educational
Studies Volume 54 Issue 3 Page 288 - September 2006
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Table 3.13
GCSE or equivalent attainment: by free school meal eligibility, 2005/06
England
Percentages
5 grades
A* to C
5 grades
A* to C
including
English and
mathematics
Any
passes
Boys
Free school meals
Non-free school meals
1
All pupils
28.3
55.8
52.2
16.6
43.2
39.7
92.5
97.4
96.8
Girls
Free school meals
Non-free school meals
All pupils1
37.0
65.7
61.9
22.3
52.0
48.0
94.9
98.3
97.8
All
32.6
19.5
Free school meals
60.7
47.5
Non-free school meals
1
56.9
43.8
All pupils
1 Includes pupils where information was refused or not obtained.
Source: Department for Education and Skills
93.7
97.8
97.3
5
6
Attainment of five or more GCSE grades A* to C:
by parental NS-SEC, 2002, England & Wales
Youth Cohort Study, Department for Education and Skills
7
Employment rates and gross weekly earnings for full-time
employees of working age: by highest qualification, 2003
Labour Force Survey, Office for National Statistics
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Learning to Labour
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Willis’s key book “Learning to Labour” (1977).
Ethnography of ‘lads’ v. ‘er oles’
Subversive culture of white working class lads.
Racist, sexist, anti-intellectual, pro a particular
view of masculinity
• Parallels Foote-Whites finding on social mobility
in Boston, street corner v college boys, loyalty to
local culture particularly sociability with your
‘mates’ inhibits the future oriented, educationally
focus for upward and geographical mobility.
• Make parallel to Goffman on asylums
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ritualistic resistance
• Willis’s (1978) … explored British working-class boys’ –
or ‘lads’, as he calls them – ritualistic resistance to
school. Willis’ project was to investigate why ‘workingclass kids get working class jobs’ (1), and to find this out
he did a school-based ethnography on a dozen ‘nonacademic’ workingclass boys. His study explores the
ways in which the lads create a counterculture that gives
them a sense of superiority in relation to the conformist
boys – or ‘ear’oles’, as the lads called them – who were
their justified target of ridicule and violence. Thus, doing
every sort of misdemeanor and getting away with doing
as little work as possible became a source of pride for
the lads particularly in relation to the ear’oles, who were
seen to embody the school’s values, (Saukko 2003:41)
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Opposition
• “The lads’ specialize in a caged resentment which always stops just
short of outright confrontation. Settled in class, as near a group as
they can manage these is a continuous scraping of chairs, a badtempered ‘tut-tuting’ at the simplest request, and a continuous
fidgeting about which explores the every permutation of sitting or
lying on a chair. During private study, some openly show disdain by
apparently trying to go to sleep with their heads sideways down on
the desk, some have their backs to the desk gazing out of the
window, or even vacantly at the wall… A continuous hum of talk
flows around injunctions not to, like the inevitable tide own barely
dried sand and everywhere there are rolled-back eyeballs and
exaggerated mutterings of conspiratorial secrets… In the corridors
there is a foot dragging walk, an over-friendly ‘hello’ or sudden
silence as the deputy [senior teacher] passes. Derisive or insane
laughter erupts which might or not be about someone who has just
passed. It is as demeaning to stop as it is to carry on…
• Opposition to the school is principally manifested in the struggle to
win symbolic and physical space from the institution and its rules
and to defeat its main perceived purpose: to make you ‘work’.”
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(Willis 1977, pp. 12-13, 26). Quoted in Giddens 1997:418-9
Prepares ‘lads’ for shopfloor life
• According to Willis, the lads’ counterculture, challenging and
rebuking the middle-class behavioural code, not only perpetuated
their underachievement at school. It also resonated with workingclass shopfloor culture, marked by male camaraderie and machobravado and valorization of practicality and suspicion of superiors
and abstract thought. In the end, Willis argues, this rich and creative,
even if also sexist and racist, counterculture, which may be seen as
contesting the alienation of school and work, pushes the lads into
workingclass jobs and eventually reproduces the labour-structure
(175). This short description of Willis’s study illustrates both how
Willis studies and conceptualizes resistance. Through ethnography,
he unravels the colourful, rambuntious counterculture that
challenges middle-class conventions. However, Willis concludes
that, eventually, this resistance does not challenge the ‘real’
structures of domination but, on the contrary, socializes the lads to
become blue-collar workers. (Saukko 2003:41)
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Is cultural resistance possible?
• Willis argues that the lads’ counter-school culture is not
sheer maladjustment but lives against and reacts to the
‘real’ alienating aspects of school and commoditization of
labour. However, this resistance, which is experienced
as a kind of ‘freedom’ by the lads, in the end turns into a
means of maintaining the labour structure (Willis, 1977:
137).
• It is difficult to assess the impact of a particular form of
resistance on wider social structures of inequality. Thus,
instead of celebrating the efficacy of resistance or
lamenting its futility, a contingent notion of resistance
asks research to investigate what exactly does it do.
(Saukko 2003:53)
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Gramsci of ideology and cultures of
resistance.
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•
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I will call the early resistance school, represented by Willis …,‘critical
contextualist’ for two reasons. First, it takes a decidedly ‘critical’ view on
resistance, looking carefully at both its creative as well as futile aspects.
Second, it is underpinned by a focus on ‘context’, so that resistance is
evaluated against its effect on ‘reality’, such as labour and educational
structures or gender roles.
The philosophical roots of this position can be traced to cultural studies’ turn
to Antonio Gramsci’s theory on ‘hegemony’ to analyze the contradictions of
culture (Gramsci, 1971; also Grossberg, 1997). According to Gramsci,
‘hegemony’ or cultural leadership, which legitimates existing social order, is
produced by cultural institutions, such as media, school, the church and so
on.
However, unlike some of the more pessimistic analyses of popular culture,
which saw it largely as an opium to keep the masses at bay (e.g. Adorno
and Horkheimer, 1979), Gramsci argued that hegemony is riddled with
contradictions. He argues that, in order to be effective, hegemony has to
win the consent of the people.Thus, in order to ‘woo’ the masses, cultural
institutions need to, on some level, incorporate elements that go against the
grain or ‘resist’ the values and interests of the powerful. At the same time,
Gramsci argued that people were simply not ‘duped’ by the hegemonic
institutions but were also capable of critically resisting their logic. (Saukko
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2003:43)
critique
• Studies on resistance may currently be considered passé. However,
I argue that many of the research dilemmas scholars studying
resistance have tried to solve continue to haunt research on lived
experience in cultural studies. Thus, research continues to struggle
with the dilemma of how to capture the creative aspects of lived
realities, while analyzing the discourses that interlace those
experiences, and, in a sense, keep people under ‘bad’ or ‘false’
consciousness. The same way the issue, of whether ‘real’ power is
material or symbolic, and how one can separate and study the two
aspects of it, remains a pressing concern in cultural and social
research. Thus, I would argue that the legacy of resistance studies
continues to underpin contemporary research on lived experience in
the paradigm, and the lessons these studies have to teach are of
continuing relevance. (Saukko 2003:40 )
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Saukko summary critique
• Uses ventriloquism, uses lads to voice
own ideological perspective
• Forces them into a ideological straitjacket
that they do not recognise.
• Resistance is contingent. Need both
macro and local perspectives to fully
contextualise cultural resistance.
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Educational research
• Willis has been highly influential in
educational research
• Changes to class system with the decline
in manufacturing industry and manual
occupations.
• Reay argues the continuity of educational
systems, in terms of purpose and
structure.
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Diane Reay 2006 The Zombie Stalking English
Schools: Social Class and Educational Inequality
British Journal of Educational Studies 54 (3): 288
• Reay on recovering class as key feature of sociology of
education.
• Points out increasing inequality, declining social mobility,
educational failure of white working class males, and
education regimes obsessed with certification.
• Useful links in reading Reay
–
–
–
–
Bourdieu – cultural capital
Foucault – surveillance
Sennet and Cobb – hidden injuries of class
Marx
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Reay’s conclusion
• ‘what progress has been made towards social justice and equality in
education for the working classes over the last hundred years?’ The
answer has to be remarkably little. The most recent statistical data
show that the educational gap between the classes has widened
over the last ten years (ONS, 2005). We are all much more
credentialled now than we were then, although there is still a very
worrying critical mass of the white working class who leave
schooling with no qualifications at all. In 2005 ten per cent of
students entitled to free school meals, and therefore from the
poorest families, were still leaving school with no qualifications at all
(Blair, 2005). The attainment gap between the classes in education
is just as great as it was 20, 50 years ago and mirrors the growing
material gap between the rich and the poor in UK society. (Reay
2006:304)
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Research on sub-cultures
• Willis goes on to study youth culture where he has been
similarly influential.
• Part of cultural studies tradition
– e.g. ‘resistance through ritual’, football
• Critique of simplistic accounts of passive audience of
popular culture
• Do older people resist ageism, can we find cultures of
resistance?
• University of 3rd Age, Red Hat Society, Raging Grannies,
etc.
• But does it change anything? If there is “nothing so
practical as a good theory” then a good theory should
give us a plan of action to change things
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GREAT OLD BROADS FOR WILDERNESS
http://www.raspberrytarts.com
http://www.raginggrannies.com/
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