Education and Power by Apple Michael W

Author:Apple, Michael W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Class, Culture, and Generalized Labor

Let us examine Paul Willis’s provocative study first. His primary questions involve how major aspects of a working-class ideology are formed and how it is that hegemony is recreated. In short, he begins with an issue very much like that concerning us here. How do ideology and class operate in schools today? Whose ideologies are dominant and in what ways? Is only reproduction going on? Unlike a number of recent theorists of reproduction who argue that the ideological forms of capitalistic society are so powerful as to be total, Willis suggests something slightly more optimistic. He argues that even though the cultural and economic apparatus of an unequal society does have immense power to control the actions and consciousness of people, there are “deep disjunctions and desparate tensions within social and cultural reproduction.” As he says, “Social agents are not passive bearers of ideology, but active appropriators who reproduce existing structures only through struggle, contestation and a partial penetration of these structures.”15

Learning to Labour is an ethnographic account of a cohesive group of working-class boys in an all-male comprehensive secondary school in an industrial area of England. The “lads,” as they are called, constitute a group of students who, like many of the students I mentioned earlier, spend a good deal of their time in school trying to maintain their collective identity and get through the day. They skillfully work the system to gain some measure of control over the way they spend their time in school, to have some free time and space, and to “have a laff.” Most importantly, they reject a large portion of the intellectual and social messages of the school, even though the institution tries to be “progressive.”

The lads are contrasted to another group of students—the “ear’oles” (or earholes, so named because they seem simply to sit and listen). These are the students who have accepted the importance of compliance to educational authority, technical knowledge, qualifications, and credentials. Nearly everything about the ear’oles provides a symbol to be rejected by the lads. The ear’oles’ clothes, haircuts, conformity to both the values and curricula of the school, the teaching staff’s more easy relationship with them, all of these are attributes of inclusion in a world the lads must reject. It is not real; it bears little resemblance to the familiar world of work, to making one’s way economically in an industrial community, to the street. Instead, “the adult world, specifically the adult male working-class world, is turned to as a source of material for resistance and exclusion.”16 For the lads, “real life” needs to be contrasted to the “oppressive adolescence” which is represented by the behavior of both the teachers and the ear’oles.17 Whether it be the accepted social relations of the school, the formal teaching of what the school considers legitimate curricular knowledge, or the rules governing the physical facility of the school building itself, these are interpreted as both opportunities and challenges to increase one’s personal mobility within the building, to meet each other, or basically to “have a laff.

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