Marxist Theorists + Evaluation

Paul Willis Learning To Labour(1977): How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs

• observed + interviewed 12 w/c boys in their final school year + first year factory labour
• boys formed anti-school subculture & had realistic view that they were innevitably going to be factory workers, so saw no point in education
• Fatalism made it impossible for them to succeed and rise above their class position, so their failure resulted from working class culture rather than the way the school operated
• Marxist as it recognised the influence of class inequalities on the attitudes of the boys and their families
• correlation between school+work = lads messed around to alleviate boredom

• Hidden Curriculum - unnoficial values learnt at school
• Correspondence principle - correspondence school + workplace
• school discourages questioning of what teachers tell you
• school tasks dull and repetitive like factory work
• rewards are extrinsic, not intrinsic. Only benefit of schoolwork is the qualifications - like a pay packet
• tasks fragmented by bells - labour on a production line is broken up into little unfulfilling processes
• Identical uniforms + punishment for lateness is humbling
• constant supervision prepares students for factory work

• Bowles + Gintis studies contradict - one says w/c are failing due to being docile, the other because of their failure to conform.
• Willis criticised for small sample size - although was a long and in-depth study + he interviewed parents.
• Bowles and Gintis study similar to Paulo Friere's 'Pedagogy of Freedom(1998)' - wrote that teacher's role should be to help poor students and help change society by questionning it. He was imprisoned for his beliefs and the U.S withdrew his funding - feared his radical ideas would cause revolution
• Marxists, like functionalists, focus on how schools shaped students' attitudes and prepare them for work. Marxists see it as class based, promoting bourg students and restricting proleteriat students
• functionalists view the sorting of students as meritocratic and necessary for a society in which workers perform different functions. Emphasise cohesion between students instead of the social divisions.