著者

山本 雄二 Yamamoto Yuji 関西大学 Kansai University

出版者

東洋館

雑誌

教育社会学研究 = The journal of educational sociology (ISSN:03873145)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.43, pp.70-83, 1988-10-03

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P. Willis's Learning to Labour is one of the most important books in the field of sociology of education. In this book, he attempts to explain how working class kids get working class jobs and why they let themselves. To answer this question, he adopts an ethnographical approach which elucidates what happens to them in school. By setting two classes a priori outside the text (=his ethnography), he takes out some traits of working class culture in which working class kids willingly select manual labour. With his approach, he loses some possibilities of interpretation that lead us to see the text as a whole world in its own right. Therefore, this paper attempts to read the text without setting concepts for explanation such as "class" outside the text. It is contended that this text can be read as a story of self-discipline. Self-discipline can be defined by saying that the temporary self is not a "real self" and that one has to deny oneself to aim at a "real self". Willis's framework of the actors, that is, ear'oles, lads, and teachers may be interpreted in the following manner. Ear'oles, committed to self-discipline, have no concrete culture while lads, being far from self-disciplined, are integrated into a concrete group culture. This difference causes gaps between the two groups in the way they define themselves. Ear'oles cannot define themselves but in contrast lads believe themselves to be complete. Teachers, agents of self-discipline, feel ambivalent towards both ear'oles and lads. The Distinction betwetn self-discipline and two other similar notions -"individualism" by Willis and "internalized norms" by Bowles & Gintis, are made clear in the final part of the paper. Self-discipline, as the ethos of modern education, helps us not only understand the relations among members in school but also causes us to reconsider what modern education is about.