Determined to Work? Review of Wolfgang Lehmann, Choosing to Labour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do high school students in Canada and Germany decide what kind of work they want to do after graduation?Wolfgang Lehmann, a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario, asked over 100 students in Edmonton and Bremen and found some surprising results.This is not an oral history, but rather a qualitative study addressed primarily to Canadian educational policy makers and school administrators.Nevertheless, oral historians can learn from the ways in which social scientists analyze and interpret qualitative data such as interviews.In the first part of his book, Lehmann describes his research results.Although statistics reveal that social status determines to a large degree whether students choose to apprentice in a trade or go on to university, the young men and women describe their choices as their own.Despite very different school systems in Germany and Canada, there are no significant differences in this gap between reality and perception.Lehmann is particularly interested in the students who decided to learn a trade.While Germany's apprenticeship system has a long history and is deeply integrated in the school system and labour market, Canada has no overarching system.Thus, he takes Alberta's Registered Apprenticeship Program as a case study.The crucial question about apprenticeship systems is whether apprenticeships help students achieve the best education or whether they channel working-class children into working-class jobs, thus perpetuating class structures and reproducing social inequality.Research, including Lehmann's own, shows that the latter is the case, and that there is little room for students' actual agency.This is particularly problematic for female students, because they make their decisions within deeply gendered familial and social circumstances.Although girls and women have become more successful in education, their virtual absence from trades -and the lack of trades (outside of hairdressing) for them -leave female students not going on to higher education with a bleak future.Yet, even young women planning to go on to college or university plan their careers with considerations about future family plans in mind that put them into the traditional role of stay-at-home mom.Young men's silence about family in discussing their careers similarly points to gendered expectations of their future wives to stay at home with their future children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".