published a letter from the head of an immigrant centre in Bradford saying of Angela Davis that the quicker that Davis creature is removed from society, the better", (see also "Our old friend, Carter", The Red Mole, 34). It would be wrong to see this incident as an isolated and unfortunate blot on an otherwise progressive education policy. In fact, immigrant children in Bradford are receiving an education guaranteed to satisfy capitalism's need for a reservoir of disposable unskilled labour.
There were 7,297 immigrant children in Bradford schools in September, almost all Asian; 799 more than the previous year, and increasing as more children of immigrant families reach school age. Bradford's policy is to place immigrant children whose English is not up to following the normal school curriculum in one of 13 special immigrant centres. The children attend these full-time for three or four terms until they are ready to be transferred to a normal school.
This policy of segregation has two major failings. It prevents the child from learning English through everyday use with English-speaking children; and it reinforces the social segregation that is the lot of black children in a racialist society.
SYLLABUS QUITE UNSATISFACTORY The syllabus in the centres is mainly language work, with maths, some art, and little else. This is quite unsatisfactory for the following reasons: 1. The language course used is the Peak coursedesigned for Asian children of primary school age in East Africa. Apart from cultural differences, it is especially inappropriate for secondary aged children, who are still using the East African equivalent of Janet and John. The Scope course, specifically developed for Asian children of primary age in Britain, is hardly used. 2. The provision of modern language teaching aids at the centres is totally inadequate. If businessmen can take a crash course in a foreign language in six weeks, and grammer school children can be supplied with language laboratores to get their O levels, why is it that immigrant centre facilities do not even match those provided for schools in Educational Priority Areas? 3. The children get a monotonous diet of old.
fashioned language teaching and very little else. The centres are illequipped to teach maths in a modern way, let alone science or domestic science or history. Yet science lessons, for example, are an excellent way of teaching English in a meaningful context even at quite an elementary level.
Amazingly, at one secondary centre the children get no physical education at all except an hour of swimming each week.
One centre briefly had a lively speech and drama teacher, who was sacked because the head 'didn't like his personality.
ESPECIALLY RAW DEAL FOR OLDER STUDENTS 4. The older students, for some of whom this will be the only education they get in England, get an especially raw deal. As we The Red Mole 24th Jan. 1972 Page 10 15 year old boy was expelled because he refused to accept the first job he was offered. As for the rest, "They've been rather ruthless to the others who haven't got much promise; and said get out", said Bradford's chief Youth Employment Officer.
When they leave the centres their prospects are poor. Those who go to ordinary schools are dumped in the bottom or remedial streams, although they need language help not slowlearner classes. Those who go straight out to work are handicapped in the labour market by lack of paper qualifications and often inadequate English, with little chance of getting either. As Bradford's chief Y.E.O. admitted, "There isn't any great provision for the boy who is a recent arrival, whatever his intrinsic qualities". This, together with being black, means that they are particularly hard hit by unemployment. The level of unemployment for Asian youths under 18 in Bradford is officially three times that for white youths. Surveys from other parts of the country suggest that the figure may be higher; in any case it takes no account of the number of black youths who are forced to accept jobs below their capabilities because of discrimination.' DISPERSAL POLICY Once they go into ordinary schools, Bradford's policy is to disperse immigrant children so that no school has more than 25 per cent (or 33 per cent "in special cases"). There is no educational reason for choosing this magic number rather than any other. In any case. it has been proved that social class composition, large families, overcrowding, poor housing, and high teacher turnover are all more important factors in a school's "success' than the presence of immigrants.2 Are they then going to bus working-class children into middle-class areas? Dispersal means the breakdown of any links between the school and the parent community. Dispersal leads to absurdities such as the case of the West Indian couple who refused to send their two young children five miles across Bradford to the only school that had offered them places. 3 Above all, the political rather than educational justification for dispersal is shown by the fact that white children are never bussed into black areas.
The most serious criticism of Bradford's policies is that they in fact make no attempt to educate the immigrant child according to his or her own needs. It is significant that Bradford's twice-yearly Report on the Education of Chidren of Commonwealth Immigrants is entirely concerned with statistics of admissions, and that the booklet they issue to teachers begins with a warning against "such emotive phrases as linguistically underprivileged' and 'socially and emotionally deprived". Clearly the teachers who wrote this are not on the receiving end of a culture in which racialism is institutionalised. Hence no doubt the omission of any account of colonialism in their brief history of India and Pakistan in the same booklet. A genuine education for immigrant children would take account of the nature of the society they are in, and of the culture that the children bring with them. Yet one thing the children learn very quickly is that their own abilities, values and way of life count for nothing in English schools. On the next page is a picture of an Asian girl in grammar-school type uniform: "This girl is very smart for school." Another picture shows a girl in colourful Pakistani clothes: "Look at this girl. Her dress is not right for school. She must take off her big ear-rings. She must take off her bangles and necklaces. She must take off her fancy quameez and shilwar 2. A curriculum that recognises their and put on a plain one. Now she is better, but a skirt and blouse are best for school in England."
The next page is headed "Hygiene'. Two pictures show groups of children standing apart from a single child, like an Amplex advertisement. "The boy who is standing by himself and the girl who is standing by herself have no friends. They are not clean. They do not wash or bath themselves properly. They are dirty. No one wants to be near them." The moral of the story is obvious. We know you coloured immigrants. You insist on wearing your cheap-looking tasteless clothes. Worse than that, you smell. But we're going to civilise you, fit you out with middle-class clothes and values to match.
DENIAL OF CULTURAL IDENTITY Imperialism has always justified its oppression of black people by the denial of their cultural identity. As Frantz Fanon says: "Every colonised people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the culture of the mother country. The colonised is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards."4 The relevance of this is demonstrated by some recent research into the culteral identity of young black children in England, in which a substantial proportion of them justified good characteristics-and even themselves-with white figures rather than black ones.5 Asian children were found to be less vulnerable than West Indian children because of the relative strength of their own cultural patterns, but it is precisely these that are under systematic attack in Bradford schools 6 In spite of the lip service paid to cultural pluralism, the following statement from the Report of the Common wealth Immigrants Advisory Council gives the official position: *The national system of education cannot be expected to perpetuate the different values of immigrant groups.... it must aim at producing citizens who can take their place in society properly equipped to exercise their rights and perform their duties."
We know what place in society is reserved for immigrants.
DEMAND AN ALTERNATIVE The central component of a culture is its language. By depriving immigrants of their language in schools you officially sever their links with their history, their literature Immigrant children in the centres sense that they are getting a makeshift education leading to the night shift at the mill or the dole queue, but elsewhere the myth prevails. The Bradford immigrant community must demand: 1. The closing of the immigrant centres and • the integration of their children into ordinary schools, with part-time crash language programmes in withdrawal classes.
cultural identity, including some classes in thier own languages. 3. Proper provision of technical and language classes at the technical colleges for school leavers. 4. Control of immigrant education in the hands of the immigrant community.
Dick Mole FOOTNOTES 1 See the Stevenson-Wallis Report (article in Observer, 22 November 1970). 2 Carol Blair, Immigrant Education and Social Class' in Race Today, August 1971 and Dr.
Little in TES, 10 September 1971. 3 Yorkshire Evening Post, 18 March 1971. 4 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks. 5 David Milner, 'Prejudice and the Immigrant Child", in New Society, 23 September 1971. 6 Contrary to suggestions that immigrants really want integration, see, for example, the report of Marcus Thompson's survey of Punjabi "parents" ambitions to remain a separate community", in TES, 10 September 1971.
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