Learning to Labour Add a review

Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs is a 1977 book on education, written by British social scientist and cultural theorist Paul Willis. A Columbia University Press edition, titled the "Morningside Edition," was published in the United States shortly after its reception.

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 it, Willis attempts to explain the role of youths' culture and socialization as mediums by which schools route working-class students into working-class jobs. Stanley Aronowitz, in the preface to the Morningside edition, hails the book as a key text in Marxist social reproduction theory about education, advancing previous work in education studies by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America, as well as work by Michael Apple and John Dewey.

Learning to Labour has been recognized by sociologists, critical pedagogues, and researchers in education studies as a landmark study of schooling and culture, and is one of the most cited sociological texts in education studies.