Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

“How the System Works: The Black child’s true identity is denied daily in the classroom. In so far as he is given an identity, it is a false one. He is made to feel inferior in every way. In addition to being told he is dirty and ugly and ‘sexually unreliable’, he is told by a variety of means that he is intellectually inferior. When he prepares to leave school, and even before, he is made to realise that he and ‘his kind’ are only fit for manual, menial jobs.

The West Indian child is told on first entering the school that his language is second rate, to say the least. Namely, the only way he knows how to speak, the way he has always communicated with his parents and family and friends; the language in which he has expressed all his emotions, from joy to sorrow; the language of his innermost thoughts and ideas, is ‘the wrong way to speak’.

A man’s language is part of him. It is his only vehicle for expressing his thoughts and feelings. To say that his language and that of his entire family and culture is second rate, is to accuse him of being second rate. But this is what the West Indian child is told in one manner or another on his first day in an English school.

As the weeks and months progress, the Black child discovers that all the great men of history were white—at least, those are the only ones he has been told about. His reading books show him white children and white adults exclusively. He discovers that white horses, white rocks and white unicorns are beautiful and good; but the word ‘Black’ is reserved for describing the pirates, the thieves, the ugly, the witches, etcetera. This is the conditioning effect of what psychologists call word association on people’s minds. If every reference on TV, radio, newspapers, reading books and story books in school shows ‘Black’ as being horrible and ugly, and everything ‘white’ as being pure, clean and beautiful, then people begin to think this way on racial matters.”

Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50^th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.

“Prejudice and Patronisation: There are three main ways in which a teacher can seriously affect the performance of a Black child: by being openly prejudiced; by being patronizing; and by having low expectations of the child’s abilities. All three attitudes can be found among teachers in this country. Indeed, these attitudes are widespread. Their effect on the Black child is enormous and devastating.

That there are many openly prejudiced teachers in Britain is not in doubt in my mind. I have experienced them personally. I have also consulted many black teachers whose experience with some white teachers are horrifying. Two West Indian teachers in South London have reported to me cases of white teachers who sit smoking in the staff-room, and refuse to teach a class of nearly-all-Black children, When on occasion they state to their refusal to teach ‘those [plural form of the n-word]’. These incidents were reported to the head teachers of the schools, who took no action against the teachers concerned. In fact, the heads of these schools had been trying to persuade the children to leave the school when they reached school-leaving age, even though their parents wished them to continue in their education, in some cases in order to obtain CSEs and ‘O’ Levels, and in other cases because they thought the children could benefit from another year’s general education. Therefore, the teachers in this case conspired to prevent these Black children from furthering their education by simply refusing to teach them.

There are many more teachers who are patronising or condescending towards Black children. These are the sort who treat a Black child as a favourite pet animal. I have often overheard teachers saying: ‘I really like that coloured child. He is quite bright for a coloured child.’ One teacher actually said to me one day, in a sincere and well-meaning type of voice: ‘Gary is really quite a nice boy considering he is Black’. There are other teachers who will not press the Black too hard academically, as ‘he isn’t really up to it, poor chap’. Children can see through these hypocritical and degrading statements and attitudes more often than adults realise, and they feel deeply aggrieved when anyone treats them as being inferior, which is what patronisation is all about. They build up resentment, and develop emotional blocks to learning.”

Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50^th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.