Set
down
in black
and white
A
journey that begins in the
segregated southern US
ends with salutary lessons
for 21st-century Britain.
Tim
Brighouse applauds the enduring brilliance of
James A. Banks
Race,
Culture and Education: the
selected works of James A. Banks
Routledge World Library of
Educationalists £22.99
This book
made me ashamed of my ignorance in a way that I recall happening only once
before. I had just started my second teaching job, in a secondary modern in
South Wales at the beginning of the 1960's. My fifth year O-level/CSE group-how
sepia-tinted it all appears now-was studying 19th Century British history.
I was relieved as this had been my period of special interest and study at
university and I was naturally anxious to pick up quickly from where my predecessor
had left off. The syllabus was with the Welsh exam board. The extent to which
my youthful confidence was misplaced soon became clear as I learned of and
then rapidly taught the shockingly brutal mistreatment of the Welsh by the
British during that period. "Why hadn't my education covered that?"
I asked myself.
James A. Banks was starting his teaching career in the United States at the
same time and asking similar but even more pointed questions. He had been
brought up a poor black boy in Arkansas, where the implications of segregation
were in his face every day. The opening chapters of Banks's contributions
to Routledge's excellent series of key educationists' selected writings graphically
illustrate the consequences of hypocrisy and double standards as applied to
black Americans.
The 1954 Brown judgment, which provided the stimulus for a reluctant white
community to accept the drive for integrated schooling came too late to affect
Banks's own childhood. So his first-hand account of segregation at water fountains,
doctors' and dentists' surgeries, churches, and of course, schools is especially
powerful.
Banks recalls asking himself during his schooldays: "Why were the slaves
pictured in the history books as happy? . . . The image of happy slaves was
inconsistent with everything I knew about the African-American descendents
of enslaved people from my segregated community. We had to drink water from
the fountains labelled 'colored' and we could not use the city library. But
we were not happy about either of these legal requirements. In fact we resisted
these laws in powerful and subtle ways each day. As children we savoured the
taste of 'white water' when the authorities were preoccupied with more serious
infractions against the racial caste system."
He describes too, the bewilderment of black children when they were splashed
by the mud from buses ferrying white children to previously all-black schools
when finally action was taken to desegregate education.
And all this at a time when in the UK we were indignant about apartheid in
Rhodesia and South Africa but often less interested in the situation across
the Atlantic and at home.
Banks, its founding father, understands why "multicultural" education
has sometimes received a bad press. It only needs a gaffe by one of its over-enthusiastic
followers to bring a hail of criticism on its head. So "Bas bas rainbow
sheep" stories surface from time to time leading to derision even from
those who perhaps are uncomfortably aware of the continuing individual and
institutional racism in our midst. Each time this happens the latent racism
of the man (and it is usually a man) in the street is reinforced. Why else
would the BNP prosper?
Banks is more than a founding father; he's a rigorous, pioneering thinker
and the pre-eminent black academic of my lifetime. Reading these extracts
meticulously argued with not a hint of unsubstantiated opinion, you can see
why his influence has been seminal. His definition of social science is the
best and most compelling I have ever read. The opening chapter of the section
on "Teaching decision making and citizen action" should be read
by every politician and education leader in the country.
His analysis and clarification of the stages of scientific thinking needed
for sound decision-making reminds the reader just how irrational our political
process has become as politicians increasingly make decisions based on what
they think people want to hear. It's timely to remind ourselves that this
faulty process is also being applied to our schooling system. How schools
are organized, funded and made accountable, what they teach and even how they
teach it, who is admitted to which school; all these decisions are being made
at a national level where the political-media interface is at its most insidious.
After reading this book it's hard not to be convinced that "critical
enquiry" should be part of a much reduced national and international
curriculum, and that every teacher in every subject area (but especially history)
should be required to teach outside the set curriculum.
Banks's scholarly journey, shaped though it is by the civil rights movement,
does not end with multiculturalism and race. It continues through the final
section ("Democracy, diversity and citizenship") into what it means
to educate citizens in a global age. Here you'll find the reasons why we should
be uncomfortable with the current debate about teaching "Britishness."
Finally-a test of a really good book-this work provoked me to think again
about two interrelated issues. First, the limitations of the pluralist viewpoint.
In a helpful analysis of the assimilationist versus pluralist debate, Banks
argues cogently for a middle way and sets out the consequences for policy
and practice in the citizenship and refugee/asylum seeker arenas.
Second, and even more important, is the issue of "choice": a word
and concept Banks does not explore, although I wish he had. All the courage
and effort that brought about desegregation are now, years later, being sacrificed
on the alter of the false god of "parental choice". In American
and UK cities, schools are once more becoming mono-ethnic (and often single-faith),
with all the long-term threat this represents to race relations and social
harmony. Covert racists everywhere make their selfish choices.
Indeed parental choice is arguably a prime example of institutional racism,
perhaps the worst consequence of our whirl-wind love affair with the application
of market principles to the provision of public services. As with the environment,
our grand-children will find it difficult either to understand or to forgive
our shortsightedness.
Tim Brighouse is chief advisor to the London Schools Challenge
Reprinted from Times Education Supplement, June 23, 2006
| HOME |