Louts and Legends

Male youth culture in an inner-city school

J. C. Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000257786
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For five years, Jim Walker followed the stories of four groups of young men, from their last years at an inner-city high school to their early twenties. Louts and Legends is a rich portrayal of their ways of life, their responses to school and teachers, and their experience of job-seeking, employment, unemployment, further education and training.

Louts and Legends presents a unique perspective on Australian culture, showing the problems, achievements, and social context of four distinct cultural styles: the macho 'Aussie' culture of the footballers; the competitive challenge of the Greeks; the 'nice guy' friendliness of the handballers; the artistic aspirations of the stigmatised three friends.

The interview and participant observation data gathered over a long period contains fresh insights on youth culture as well as moving individual stories. The findings in this book pose a challenge to educational and social policy, but they also offer realistic suggestions for teachers, youth workers, parents and for other young people.

Part I
INTRODUCTION

1
Youth culture: a case study

Ms Glymour (teacher) … Murphy’s a cocky little creep and Kazikis is the school thug. Why are you interested in all these louts, anyway?

Mosey Hey Jim! Write in the book, that this book is about the Stokey legends. We’re …

Omar Yeah! We’re all legends!

Mosey … legends in our own lifetime.

I shall use the word ‘culture’ to refer to the whole way of life of a social group. Within a group’s culture, practices in art, leisure, sport, and other physical activities are among the most important modes through which forms of gender and sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, social class and other social relations are produced, especially among young people. Conversely, they are also modes through which, in the context of schooling, such social relations affect other more formal aspects of adult life, such as credentialing and employment. This book is a study of male youth cultures in a particular school in which social relations of gender, ethnicity and class were woven into a fabric of cultural dominance, social control and individual opportunity, with significant consequences for education and social policy.

The dominant form was a culture of youthful self-congratulatory ‘Aussie’ masculinity, which highlighted standing up for oneself and one’s mates, against authority or anything else; physical, especially sporting, prowess; and daring or exciting escapades. To be successful in this culture was to be a ‘legend’. Although non-members might also claim to be legends, the most usually conceded by the dominant ‘Aussies’ was that they were ‘good blokes’. They might also, if they were less fortunate, be ‘cats’, ‘puff-heads’ or ‘poofters’. In terms of youth culture, the legends were on top; and so they were for many teachers as well. For some other teachers, they were louts. The sportsmaster was prepared to call it both ways, describing them as ‘shits and heroes’. Not all teachers, however, made such clear-cut classifications.

The legends represented one way of life among many. It is now widely recognised that it is misleading to speak in general terms about a unitary ‘youth culture’, even within one country.¹ The cultural contexts and practices of young people vary enormously, however much different cultural groups might share tastes in music, clothes, and so on. Popular entertainment, particularly movies, television series and the news media have focused on some of the more spectacular cultures: punks, skinheads, surfies and bikers for example. Sociologists have noted a wider range still, such as cultures constituted on an ethnic or gender basis.² In this book I draw attention to even more specific cultural formations, built out of neighbourhood and school contexts, as well as class, gender and ethnic relations.³

My focus on schooling, and on educational and wider social policy, is entirely from this perspective. I start with the concrete, specific, practical context of young people in which they have to make their decisions and tackle their problems, and in which they encounter the agents of educational and social policy. Although I am concerned with the cultural conditions for learning, I do not start with the school as an institution, with the aims and content of curricula, or with a set of wider social problems which have been predetermined as requiring solutions.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that in these latter contexts there is now a general awareness⁴ that schools, along with families and neighbourhoods, play a range of parts in the production of differences, on lines of social class, gender, ethnicity and residential region, in access to forms of employment, post-secondary education and other sources of social status and economic power.

But how and why do schools do this? Some have suggested that the formal, institutionalised power and authority structures of schools mirror the structure of society at large, particularly its economic institutions, no matter how much some teachers might try to be ‘progressive’ in curricula and teaching. The result, it is said, is that the social relations of each school, in some sense, ‘correspond to’ society’s economic structure and so our school system produces individuals already fitted to the world of work and adult life.⁵ This view, however, seems to leave out the many informal practices and relationships which develop in schools, the personal plans, values, and capacities to choose, which individuals, especially pupils, bring to school, and the conflicts and contests which arise between them, perhaps especially between pupils and teachers. We should not ignore the freedom of individuals to accept or reject, for their own reasons, what schools have to offer or even what they may try to enforce. A more dynamic account is needed of how schools contribute to the destinies of the people who pass through them. While there may be certain correspondences, or similarities, between what goes on in schools and what goes on elsewhere, to point to these alone in explaining people’s destinies is too limited an approach.

Another suggestion, while not ignoring the importance of the formal authority structures of schools, is that we should concentrate on the ways in which pupils respond to authority: basically, do they accept it, or reject it? In particular, we might expect that those who reject it, or ‘resist’ the ‘ideology’ of our educational system—that if we work hard at school we shall have the opportunity to choose from a variety of ‘career’ options—are themselves, ironically, guaranteeing their futures at the bottom of the hierarchy.⁶ Such ‘resisters’ are overwhelmingly of working class origin in the first place. But why do individuals reject education? For ‘resistance theory’ the answer is cultural, and in this respect is close to the perspective of the present study. They are not indoctrinated against education or upward social mobility by the school or teachers; that would be an absurd suggestion, since what is being argued is precisely that these pupils are in opposition to the values and offers of the school, including its claims to be promoting liberal, egalitarian values. No, it is argued, the explanation is to be found in the existence of counter-school cultures, derived from wider working class antagonism to intellectual things and to ‘mental labour’. Especially in the case of certain male working class pupils, there is such a value placed on physical toughness that anything other than manual work is demeaning for a man. This macho belief in the irrelevance of schooling and the rejection of non-manual work seems to have connections with the macho-manualist culture of the shop-floor, is passed on to boys through older males, particularly fathers, in family and neighbourhood. It is reinforced in opposition to conflicting values espoused by schools, which are identified with both the authority of the bosses and with despised mental labour. Thus class and gender factors combine in a culture which posits only one destiny for its members: manual labour.

This focus on ‘resistance’ is part of a wider and longer tradition in which researchers have tried to identify ‘pro-school’ and ‘anti-school’ cultures,⁷ and explain pupil ‘careers’ accordingly. ‘Louts’ and ‘school thugs’, for instance, might appear to fit readily into an ‘anti-school’ culture. But resistance theory is subject to the same sceptical doubts as all such attempted classifications, mainly as to whether such cultures exist at all in any clear cut sense. That there are representative youth cultures which, as such, are constituted as either ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ school or education, was one of the claims which I set out to test. It is not supported by the evidence gathered in this study. Further, there are general reasons for doubting it, which are congruent with the data and analysis I shall present.⁸

But there are further worries about resistance theory, or at least the major versions of it. It has been tempting for writers and other observers, and even educational practitioners themselves opposed to inequalities in the existing social order, to see hopes of social progress in what they believe to be the resistance of anti-school groups to an unjust and exploitative society. This runs the risk of romanticising working class culture, and some unpleasant forms of it at that, with sexist and racist aspects.⁹

Another approach to these questions is to emphasise the practices into which people are initiated, which they develop, modify and change, and which are rooted in complex relations between family, community, school, workplace and other social contexts. These practices, it is suggested, are what ‘make the differences’ which show up between social classes, genders, and ethnic groups.¹⁰ I agree strongly with the focus on specific practices, so long as it is not taken to exclude or be opposed to cultural analysis. In a sense which I shall explain shortly, I think that practice is culture in action, and that to understand a culture we need to understand the social relations of the group whose culture it is. To be sure, social relations exist only in social practice, as does culture, but all three elements need to be examined. This study has been an attempt to examine all three as they operate within some specific contexts, starting with a boys’ high school.

AIM OF THE STUDY

The aim was to investigate as thoroughly as time and resources permitted, in the social contexts of one locality, the dynamics of specific youth cultures in their relations with formal schooling and the transition from school to employment, unemployment, or further study. If cultures have significant effects in making and remaking differences between people, I wanted to inquire, how do they? What processes are involved in the particular set of cultural groups being researched? Only when we understand how specific cultures work, I assumed, can we begin to be confident not only about why they work that way but about why they have the effects they do, or even that they do in fact have the effects claimed for them.

To this end a long term research project was designed in which I maintained contact with selected pupils of an inner-city single-sex school from their School Certificate (SC) year (Year 10 of formal schooling, or the ‘fourth form’ of high school) in the early 1980s (when the subjects were aged around sixteen years) through the following five years as they either proceeded to the Higher School Certificate (HSC), or left school and sought employment or entrance to further educational institutions. Ethnographic methods are most appropriate to this kind of cultural study—informal observation, participant observation, informal interviewing, and compiling sets of documentary data such as school documents, local papers, newsletters. My colleague, Christine Hunt, got to know and interviewed nearly all staff teaching Year 10, as well as local youth workers, Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) officers, and community leaders.

THE SCHOOL AND ITS LOCALITY

’Stokeham Boys’ High’, like many other schools in Australian inner urban areas, occupies rather restricted space in a heavily built up and congested mixed residential, commercial and industrial environment. The school’s population is ethnically extremely diverse, reflecting the locality. A traditional Anglo-Saxon-Celtic (ASC) Australian working class has witnessed, by and large without much pleasure, waves of newcomers from over 30 different non-ASC backgrounds—principally, at present, Greek, Lebanese, Turkish and Vietnamese. The majority of parents are working class or, in the case of some of non-ASC descent, operate small businesses such as family shops, service stations and sub-contracting factories, a relevant point when we come to consider attitudes to working, to authority and to education, a complex mixture of class and ethnic elements.

The locality is part of an area with a reasonably varied industrial and commercial base, with a concentration (as measured by percentage of firms) in manufacturing (with certain industries, particularly clothing, proportionately larger than others), supplemented by commerce (including a large retailing element), finance, and transport industries, as well as other service industries. Entertainment is also well represented, often attached to clubs and restaurants. The last census before the study commenced revealed that about 10 percent of employers employed more than 25 employees, indicating the large number of small businesses in the area. Although only about 20 percent of those employed worked in manufacturing, nearly 50 percent of advertised vacancies had been in that sector, indicating, given the concentration in manufacturing, a disproportionately high labour turnover in that sector—a point relevant to the early employment experience of school leavers. There is also a certain amount of seasonal work, particularly in festive seasons when, however, as in manufacturing areas elsewhere, factories tend to close.

Unemployment remained remarkably close to the national average, in both the whole labour market and the teenage labour market. If anything, it was inclined to dip slightly below the average.

The school and the locality in which it is centrally situated are quite well served with public transport, with several bus routes running through. Although the nearest railway line is further away it provides easy access to the city and other industrial, recreational and entertainment centres.

Most residents of the area live in terrace houses, Housing Commission flats (rented from a government housing agency) or small semi-detached cottages. Thus there is medium to high-density living, with shopping, commercial and industrial facilities mixed in with residential buildings. This, and the reasonable accessibility of the city centre, provide a dense and varied environment.

Many residents work in the area itself and those who do travel to work probably do not have far to go. There is also a high proportion of people on social security benefits.

Although the area has been classified as ‘disadvantaged’ by various government and community agencies, there is a greater variety of responses from the residents to this ‘disadvantaged’ condition than may at first be recognised, and indeed there is a greater range of economic circumstances than may be apparent from an external look at the residences in the area. The interiors of at least those houses I visited ranged from beautifully and carefully ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Notes on the text
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Male Youth Culture in an Inner-City School
• Part III Conclusion
• Appendix: Researchers and subjects
• Lexicon of cultural terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index