| | 'Looking at our careers lessons, not once, not ever, have we mentioned racial discrimination. |
| | And that's not something distant to us, that's a hard reality and we've got to face it: I think they |
| | should prepare people to be ready for it and teach constructive ways of coping with it.' The |
| | speaker is an Asian sixth-former being interviewed in a programme which revealed disturbing |
| 5 | | levels of racism in Britain's schools - even among seemingly liberal teachers. As Michael Dean, |
| | who made the programme, said: 'Even when teachers don't consider themselves racially prejudiced, |
| | they still often turn a blind eye to the fact of discrimination and its hurtful effects on their |
| | pupils.' |
| | The issue rose at a comprehensive school in Manchester, where some of the staff made their |
| 10 | | own study over three years of how they should be teaching for a multi-racial society, They |
| | produced a report stressing the need for the whole staff to broaden their teaching: instead of a |
| | narrowly white Anglocentric view, they called for a multi-cultural approach, not just in history |
| | and religion but in all other subjects, including maths and science. |
| | But while working on the report, members of the staff working party came up against some |
| 15 | | teachers' attitudes as a real barrier to such change: 'I remember one particular instance when I |
| | was talking to a colleague of mine and he was saying what good is your multi-cultural working |
| | party doing, and I was trying to explain what good I thought it was doing. And he became more |
| | and more heated and it ended up in an open row. And all the old prejudices poured out and I |
| | was quite frankly appalled that a teacher in this school could be so racist. Now, whether the |
| 20 | | children from ethnic minorities would realize this, because of perhaps actions or things he said, I |
| | don't know. But certainly I'd never realized it until we had this argument.' |
| | The difficulty here is that racism can spring from entirely unconscious attitudes. Unconscious |
| | attitudes also seem to affect the way the institutions of our society are run. Power in the City, in |
| | business, in the trade union movement and in polities still reflects white dominance. A Bradford |
| 25 | | teacher, Brenda Thompson, has tried to study whether schools as institutions similarly tend to |
| | reflect rather than to counter the racism of society. She conducted the first racism-awareness |
| | workshop, organised for teachers by Bradford local authority, 'Racism is a word that is very |
| | difficult to use in Britain because it's seen as the kind of slogan trendy lefties shout. And people |
| | react to it with a certain amount of impatience and intolerance or else they see it as a personal |
| 30 | | insult. If you say this is a racist society, then it's an affront. But in the workshop we stuck with |
| | the term racism and we tried to work out what it was in our society that we - as white teachers were |
| | going along with that contributed to that injustice in society and that was seen in the kind |
| | of discrimination that we need a Race Relations Act for, for goodness sake.' |
| | So how can teachers equip themselves to deal competently with the question of racial |
| 35 | | discrimination? Brenda Thompson again: 'The teacher has to be aware of his or her own |
| | prejudices and the way in which those are fuelling the racism that is in society. Not by saying |
| | bad things necessarily, but by things that the teacher may not be doing - not stopping children |
| | who are making racist remarks; sitting and watching the British Movement* marching and doing |
| | nothing about it, so that the child knows, the white child knows, that teacher, because he's done |
| 40 | | nothing about it, thinks it's okay.' |
| | |
| | The Listener, September 9, 1982 |
* The British Movement are fanatically opposed to none-white immigrants settling in Britain.
