Success, Class, and Masculinities

This chapter is divided into two strands: the first focuses on social class and educational success (specifically for young men), and the second focuses on masculinity and educational success. It begins by reflecting on the classic studies of working-class boys’ resistance to education, from Willis’ (1977) oft-cited text Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs to Brown’s (1987) Schooling Ordinary Kids. In doing this it prefaces key debates on resistance to schooling that emerged from studies of working-class boys in the 1970s and 1980s, before moving on to discuss taking a sensitive approach to researching class and masculinity. The chapter then turns to a discussion of ways of constructing and framing masculinity.