Cultural Resistance:An Interpretation Of Paul Willis's Learning To Labour

Learning to Labour:How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Work,the book of Paul Willis,is a classic book of youth subculture and ethnographic,also is an important work in the field of pedagogy and sociology.The publication of the book laid Willis the historical position in ethnography,anthropology and sociology education research.The book describes that Willis,by observing the working-class students' resistance to teaching activities and social reproduction mechanism,emphasizes the subject's irnitiative in cultural acceptance,and on the other hand,from patriarchal society,gender discrimination,racial diserimination and so on several aspects to explain the failure of the working-class ehildren react to cultural hegemony,then points out that school education is a tool for social reproduction of capitalism.Cultural resistance is a concept opposed to "mainstream culture".In the past,cultural resistance has always been regarded as a subculture of anti-conventional,non-mainstream.However,the subculture here only emphasizes "secondary" does not highlight"resistance".A society cannot have one only voice.Although resistance is thin and limited,it strongly impacts the single hegemonic culture situation,and affects the establishment and improvement of various value systems of a society.This resistance and collision will never disappear.This article will focus on Paul Willis's book "Learning to Labour-Why the Working Class Children Are Undertaking the Father's Work The first half part of the book has detailed ethnographic records,and the latter part analyzes the cultural resistance of the working class children in Hammer Town by cultural reproduction.This paper starts from the background of the appearance of u learning to Labour and then discusses the differences between Willis's reproduction analysis theory and the previous reproduction analysis theory in analyzing the reproduction of the working class culture.Finally,through these analysis to find out what are the limitations of cultural resistances in "Learning to Labour ",and what are the enlightenment for education research.