Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - The Sunday Times Bestseller

by Akala

  Of course, I have no idea if the snowman incident had anything to do with race and class in a direct sense, and I’m sure there are plenty of horrible teachers at private boarding schools too, but as you will see in Chapter Five, this particular teacher was an odd kind of liberal and seemed to have a real issue with me and my friend from Indonesia in particular, and my older sister before that. It may just have been she was in a bad mood that day, did not like children generally or just did not like me. Perhaps she genuinely thought I was being lazy with the drawing, who knows? I retell this story in this context, however, to reflect on how a relatively simple action from an adult, in this case the tearing of a drawing, can affect a child’s self-esteem quite dramatically, though I am aware it hardly ranks highly on the list of cosmic injustices.

  If there is a silver lining, perhaps this and other experiences like it have given me a degree of humility – a knowledge that whatever talents I have are only relative. As a child, I could remember dates and facts with relative ease and I was very good at mathematics – though I am crap at maths now through lack of practice. I was an archetypal nerd in my tastes, often preferring to watch wildlife documentaries than cartoons, and I could be found at many a family party engaged in philosophical discussions with the adults over and above running around with the other children. I wanted to be a scientist of some kind and/or an astronaut. When my school took us to the Planetarium and the Science Museum it blew my mind to think about how vast the universe was and how much humans had come to know about it through curiosity and hard work. I was being shown the very best of British achievements – Newtonian physics, the theory of evolution, the steam engine – yet being led away from my natural desire to pursue these interests by the outdated bigotry and class conditioning of some of my educators. I was being encouraged to admire men – and they mostly were men, for obvious reasons – who had changed the course of history and expanded the scope of human knowledge, and at the same time being told to know my place. I was being exposed to genius but being rewarded for not trying to aspire to it myself.

  This gives us pause for thought about formal education as a whole and the dynamics contained within it: whether education should be a site of power, a place to reproduce the social, societal norms, or a place to be encouraged to question and thus attempt to transcend them and be an active participant in remaking them. Is state education designed to encourage more Darwins and Newtons, or to create middle-management civil servants and workers? What tensions are brought into being when a child’s natural proclivity to question everything in their own unique way comes into contact with a one-size-fits-all mode of education?

  State schooling in Britain both today and when I was a child seems stuck in a Victorian-era paradigm, guided by notions of discipline, obedience and deference to ones betters, of becoming a good worker and getting a good job. The idea that we go to school to find our passions, our calling, to learn to be happy, to ‘draw out that which is within’, as the root meaning of the word ‘educate’ commands, is almost entirely absent. Let alone any sense that we plebs should contemplate participating in the governing of the country.

  We can become so enthralled with officialdom that it’s easy to forget that curricula are not the result of some universal abstract truth but rather the designs of actual human beings like you and me. Despite the fact that I got almost straight As, at no point in my formal schooling was I ever taught to think in terms of class or race, even though those two concepts have obviously shaped the world and my reality so profoundly – though in full fairness I did not take sociology as a GCSE option. I left school without knowing what capitalism was, much less a mortgage, interest rates, central banking, fiat currency or quantitative easing. The word imperialism had never been used in the classroom, much less ‘class struggle’. What history I did learn can be seen as little more than aristocratic nationalist propaganda; Henry VIII and his marital dramas; how Britain and America defeated the Nazis – minus the Commonwealth and with a very vague mention of the Soviet contribution; how Britain had basically invented democracy and all that was good and wonderful.

  No one in my classes was given any understanding at all of why their classroom contained people whose parents hailed from all over the world; when the British Empire did come up it was as this plucky railway-building and sugar-exporting exercise devoid of any human victims. The fact that Britain has almost constantly been at war for the last century, even during the entire ‘post-war’ era, was of course not mentioned even once.1 I understand that managing a national curriculum is no mean feat but I am not sure that children being taught that their state is essentially benevolent, if a little rough round the edges, is the best way to breed adults who actually respect the limited freedoms their ancestors have attained. Thus it can be said that even though I left school with almost straight As, I had learned very little critical thinking in formal schooling. What remnants of disobedience I had left were learned outside of school, or taught by the few renegade teachers that encouraged us to go beyond the curriculum.

  I am aware that it’s cliché to look to the Nordic countries as ideal models and I’m sure their systems have their own deficiencies, but my experiences teaching in Scandinavia still shocked me. I saw children waltz into school to loud house music blaring from the school speakers, I went into classrooms where no one calls their teachers ‘Miss’ or ‘Sir’, and yet this lack of formality does not seem to be affecting the quality of their educational outcomes. In just one example, in Copenhagen I worked with a school group in a rough ‘suburb’ (what we call a housing estate) where many of the kids were migrants from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and other areas of conflict. To my complete shock, within five years of being in Denmark all of these children – a mix of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants – had learned to speak Danish fluently and English to a standard that the poems they created compared favourably with any written by an average group of British sixteen-year-olds.

  While it’s always dangerous to extrapolate from an isolated experience, this did send me into a philosophical examination of British educational attitudes and practices and I concluded that our schools do indeed, for the most part, kill creativity as writer and internationally renowned educator Ken Robinson asserts,2 and I would argue that they do this by design. This led me to do some more research and stumble across the ‘perplexing’ case of Finland, where students have no uniforms, are not banded into sets by ability, are not regularly tested or ranked and yet are as high-achieving as any in the world, and the gap between their ‘strongest’ and ‘weakest’ pupils is the smallest.3

  My friend, the classical composer and entrepreneur I mentioned in the previous chapter, had a similar ‘know it all’ experience in school, except all subtleties were suspended. He comes from a very formal and strictly religious Caribbean family, so when his mother was called into his primary school one day it was taken very seriously at home. The teacher went on to tell his mother that her son was too smart, he knew all the answers and that he was ‘not giving the white kids a chance’. If she could just get him to be quiet, that would be wonderful. His mum is a fairly reserved person, but even she could hardly contain her indignation at something so ridiculous.

  But is it so ridiculous? Well, on the one hand it’s totally absurd for a teacher to feel this was an issue worth calling a parent into school for, on the other hand I actually understand where the teacher is coming from, and can usually empathise if given the opportunity to have an open, adult conversation about things. British identity, despite all of the liberal rhetoric to the contrary, is obviously seen as synonymous with whiteness; modern British identity grew with and was shaped by the fundamentally and undeniably racist British Empire. The domination of ‘subject races’ is one part of that identity and for many teachers – in this case a woman born in the 1930s – it’s entirely understandable, though still unacceptable, that within that frame of reference she would feel like a traitor to her race, to her culture and to her nation if she w
as to encourage colonial migrants – members of the subject races – to reach their full potential for excellence. To blame individual teachers or write this phenomenon off as just a few bad apples is not only to completely ignore completely decades of studies, but also to refuse to confront one of the key contradictions of British modernity.4

  When large numbers of British-born black children started to attend British schools in the 1960s, the establishment was presented with a serious problem. How to educate – or under-educate – a group of people it had never intended to have full citizenship rights and did not really see as British. This problem must also be placed within the context of an already heavily class-stratified society and the history of education more broadly. During the 1960s, remnants of eugenics-inspired assumptions about students’ natural abilities were still all the rage – schools for the ‘Mentally Subnormal’ (MSN) had simply been rebranded with the slightly more palatable title of schools for the ‘Educationally Sub Normal’ (ESN). These were schools outside of the official system where apparently difficult students, those with ‘special needs’ or those with learning difficulties, were dumped. Unsurprisingly, black children were found to be massively over-represented in these ESN schools in relation to the percentage they made up of the population as a whole.

  As a response to this reality, Grenadian scholar Bernard Coard set about publishing the now legendary ‘How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System’ to expose the scandal of systemic discrimination in British schools.5 The pamphlet was published by a small independent black publishing company and sold all 10,000 copies of its initial run and actually received generally favourable press at the time of publication in 1971. The reaction of the establishment was of course to deny the truths set out by Coard – before eventually admitting he was in fact correct – but more shockingly to tap his phone and have the police threaten his nephew, such is the weaponised history of black education in Britain.6

  The response of the British Caribbean community and progressive teaching staff was to attempt to try to tackle what they knew was an endemically and unfairly racist system. In every major Caribbean community, black supplementary schools were set up, like the one I went to during my childhood. The first of these supplementary schools had already been set up three years before the publication of Coard’s pamphlet, by Professor Gus John, and Coard estimates that as many as 150 of them existed at the peak of the movement. Parent–teacher conferences and initiatives were launched, and scholars and black professionals lent their voices to a mass campaign to ensure that black children were given a fairer deal in Britain’s school system.

  It is a very odd community indeed that simultaneously takes their meagre resources – remember most British Caribbeans are working class even now – and uses them to set up extra schools for their children, that manages to find volunteers willing to staff these schools every weekend for decades and is at the same time ‘anti-education’, as black people have so often been represented.

  How have things progressed since the 1970s, and since I was in school? Are black children being treated fairly in British schools these days? Sadly and predictably, the answer is no. For example in the year 2000, David Gillborn – David is white by the way, for all those who need white references – and his colleague Heidi Safia Mizra were commissioned by Ofsted to examine the links between race, ethnicity and educational attainment as part of the legacy of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.7 They examined the data from six local authorities’ ‘baseline assessments’, which use a mix of written tests and teacher assessment to measure pupils’ intelligence when they enter the school system aged five. They found several unsurprising things that fly in the face of all the eugenics-based bullshit, most notably:

  • There was significant variation in the levels of attainment among the same ethnic groups in different parts of the country

  • There was at least one Local Education Agency (LEA) where each of the major ethnic groups was the most likely to achieve five off more GCSE passes

  • In one particular LEA, black children had the highest assessment scores of all ethnic groups when they entered school aged five

  • In all six LEAs, the educational attainment of black students fell relative to the LEA average as they moved through the school system

  • In the largest LEA in their sample, one of the largest in the country, black students entered the school twenty points above the national average as the highest performing ethnic group and in that very same LEA they left school as the lowest performing of all groups, twenty-one points below the national average

  This report was widely cited in the left-wing media at the time, and you would perhaps think that showing such an obviously racialised pattern of educational disenfranchisement across all six LEAs would have caused a sea change in policy for the better, if indeed the intention was to remedy said institutional racism. Such change did not happen, and national policy changed instead to assess children entering school using the Foundation Stage Profile, or FSP method, a method that is entirely down to the individual teacher’s judgment – that is to say, non-empirical.

  Unsurprisingly, the outcome of FSP, teacher-assessed tests has been to conclude that white children are actually the smartest of all ethnic groups, despite the fact that Indian students have been dramatically outperforming them on average for many years. Why the state would make a form of non-empirical assessment compulsory in Britain’s schools when it so obviously leaves room for whim and even unintended bias one can only ponder. We can be sure that if the FSP assessments had dramatically changed the picture to the detriment of white students they would have been changed by now. No special treatment is needed or being asked for, just a fair test that removes the margin for human error or misperception to influence the results. That’s if we must test five-year-olds at all.

  We know for certain that this trend of underestimating black children’s intelligence continues right throughout schooling, which tallies with my experience and makes sense of the LEA data quoted above, where black children fall further behind the longer they stay in school. It is not complex; if a fair portion of your teachers or even just a couple of them constantly assume you are way less clever than you actually are simply because you are black, and treat you accordingly, you are going to resent them and it will naturally affect your self-esteem and grades.

  In the final year of primary school in England and Wales, all pupils must take external examinations, which are blind marked by someone who does not know the child, thus eliminating any potential for racial bias. At the same time, teachers also assess the children in their class. According to a national study by Bristol University, between 2001–02 and 2004–05 teacher assessments of black Caribbean students were 5.6 points below their ‘blind’ SATs results.8 This figure was 6.4 points for black African students, almost double that of the difference between teacher assessments and SATs for white students, which stood at 3.3 points. The study proved beyond any doubt that British teachers assess black pupils’ academic ability as being far lower than their actual academic ability, and underestimate their intelligence twice as much as they do for white children. Intriguingly, teachers underestimate black British students of African origin by an even greater degree than those whose great-grandparents came from the Caribbean, despite the fact that British-African students have generally performed better academically. It is only with the blind marking of Key Stage 2 SATs, in which an external marker does not know the child they are assessing, that we can see the huge discrepancy between teacher assessments and blind test results.

  The same study also concluded that Indian and Chinese students tended to be over-assessed by their teachers in comparison to their actual academic performance, again confirming the widespread stereotype that they are all super-smart, and white students from poorer areas tended to be more underestimated than white students from more expensive postcodes. In short, the study confirmed that teachers are human beings and that they pro
ject their biases and those of our society onto children. The DfE is as aware of these studies and this data as I am – or at least we would hope so – and technically they have a legal duty to eliminate racial bias from within Britain’s education system, but as you will see in a later chapter it is increasingly unlikely that they are going to do so without serious parental, community and teacher pressure.

  When understood in its historical context, then, my being siphoned off into a special needs group starts to make much more sense. What’s fascinating is that the British state, apparently committed to a quality education for all, has rarely and barely supported these massive community-led efforts to make sure black Brits attain a quality education, and in the decades since the initial sympathy to Coard’s work and the issues it raised, the British media has in fact been happy to feed the image of young black people as little more than thugs, muggers and drug dealers with little to offer British society.

  Nonetheless, my generation of British Caribbeans experienced schooling quite differently from our parents in a number of ways. First, I don’t think it an overly harsh generalisation to say that our colonially educated grandparents generally had more faith in the British authorities than our parents came to have, and this often led them to refuse to hear the legitimate complaints of their own children against ‘authority’. Tales of being unjustly beaten – corporal punishment in school was not made illegal until 1986 – or otherwise punished by teachers, and then returning home to complain to parents who would then beat you again – often far worse than the teachers had, it must be admitted – and insist that ‘you must a do something wrong if dem beat you’ and ‘if you na hear u mus feel’ are typical of our parents’ age group. Our British-born parents therefore well understood the racialised challenges their children would inevitably face in school and thus, while their strategies to combat such things were not always perfect, they certainly were far less likely to side with the authorities against their own children.