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The Resistance of Working Class Children and Youth to Control, 1889-1939

Stephen Humphries

出版	University of Sussex
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=4pjJoAEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋

The thesis has two principal and related aims. First, it attempts to critically examine the dominant theoretical and empirical traditions in the conceptualisation of working-class youth and its delinquent cultural forms. It seeks to demonstrate how constant reference to theories of mass culture and deprivation have tended to trivialise and devalue the cultural forms of working-class youth. This necessarily involves exposing and dismantling the theoretical prejudice and depersonalising imagery which surrounds the study of this particular group. Thus, the explanations offered by the moral entrepreneurs, psychologi. sts, criminologists and sociologists who have dominated this field are subjected to critical analysis. Second, in the process of dismantling received theories on working-class youth, the thesis offers an alternative class based interpretation of their behaviour, which situates resistance within various class formations and relationships, showing the continuity and similarity between working-class youth and parent cultures. in fact the empirical substance of the thesis explores the resistance of working class children and youth to various institutions of control, manipulation and exploitation, during the fifty year time span between 1889 and 1939. The behaviour which I argue can be conceptualised as resistance, is the persistent rule breaking and opposition to authority characteristic of working-class youth culture, behaviour which has traditionally been conceptualised in terms of indiscipline or delinquency. The most conspicuous activities with which this study is concerned are disaffection from school work, classroom disobedience, school strikes, larking about, social crime, street gang violence, rebellious sexual behaviour, absenteeism and acts of industrial sabotage, activities which oral and documentary evidence suggest have recurred vrith some continuity during the past century. The thesis seeks to explain these phenomena in terms of a complex process of class contradictions and class conflict. Clearly, any account of an under-privileged and'largely anonymous group like working-class children and youth requires a different methodological approach from that ordinarily employed by historians. Since the control of manuscript and printed evidence by adults, normally middle class adults, is absolute, most documentary sources present a biased and distorted view of the resistance of working-class youth. The thesis attempts to redress the balance by re-writing the history of working-class childhood and youth through the words of working-class people who themselves experienced it.