[1] Willis's first major book, Learning to Labour relates the findings of his ethnographic study of working-class boys at a secondary school in England.
In this section, he applies thick description and ethnographic analysis to the counter-school culture of the lads, recognizing the legitimacy and reality of the students' own interpretive accounts of schooling.
In Part Two, Willis analyzes his own ethnography to produce a theoretical account of how counter-school culture plays a vital role in leading working-class students into subordinate, low-wage labor positions in adult life, fulfilling what he calls their "self-damnation.
"[4] Working-class youths' recognition of, and reaction against, the dominating, disciplinary mechanisms of school help seal their future outcomes as workers, in turn enabling the social reproduction of class positions.
This includes the active search for producing moments of excitement, disorder, and enjoyment in what is an otherwise boring, routine, and meaningless span of time of work for adult workers, and school discipline for students.
Willis writes:There is also a sense in which, despite the ravages -- fairly well contained at this point anyway -- manual work stands for something and is a way of contributing to and substantiating a certain view of life which criticises, scorns and devalues others as well as putting the self, as they feel it, in some elusive way ahead of the game.
These feelings arise precisely from a sense of their own labour power which has been learnt and truly appropriated as insight and self-advance within the depths of the counter-school culture as it develops specific class forms in the institutional context.
Rather, it is in school that the lads acquire a distorted class consciousness through their counter-school culture, in which they end up embracing working-class, manual labor as more affirming and authentic.
[1] In his analysis, Willis defines and uses the following concepts: In Learning to Labour, the informal, creative, counter-school culture of the lads is vital to understanding the reproduction of class structure.
The actually varied, complex, and creative field of human consciousness, culture, and capacity is reduced to the dry abstraction of structural determination.
[3][10][11] In the years after its original release, Willis discussed his research with a variety of educators and community groups, who provided both support and criticism.
Jean Anyon, Michael Apple, Peter McLaren, and other academics contributed essays to the anthology, applying Willis's ethnography to contemporary issues of gender, race, neoliberalism, work precarity, globalisation, media, and mass incarceration in the United States.
[12] For instance, Black youth in United States schools develop cultures of oppositionality, collective identity, and "tough fronts," similar to the Hammertown lads, but are led to incarceration instead of working-class jobs.
[13][14] Learning to Labour has also been cited in later ethnographies of poor youth and economic inequality, such as Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods and Jay MacLeod's Ain't No Makin' It.
Willis acknowledged that shortly after its first release, some right-wing policymakers and politicians sought to appropriate its findings to justify tracking and legitimate educational inequality.
[20] While Willis repudiated this use of his work, he even more strongly criticised well-intending, liberal policies that sought to extirpate counter-school cultures: Besides, even in the worst case of interpretation and action taken on the book-the "oiling" paradigm-a cynical recognition of actual cultures is preferable to their attempted destruction as "pathological" cases, or their chimerical projection into shocking Satanic forms visited upon us from nowhere.