Trivia Tuesday: Does Education Help Us Climb the Social Ladder? This Author Says Modern Schools Might Instead Reinforce Social and Economic Class Divides
Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor examines a debate that is just as lively today as it was when this book was first published almost forty years ago. Willis observed a group of working-class boys who were classmates in a secondary school in an English industrial town. His controversial study illuminates the pervasiveness of class in lived experience and demonstrates that our educational systems sometimes perpetuate social and economic hierarchies instead of finding ways to help students climb the ladder to a higher tier than that of their parents.
