“The Emotional Disturbance Bias: Many of the problem children, I would contend, are suffering a temporary emotional disturbance due to severe culture and family shock, resulting from their sudden removal from the West Indies to a half-forgotten family, and an unknown and generally hostile environment. They often react by being withdrawn and uncommunicative, or, alternatively, by acting out aggressively, both of which are well-known human reactions to upset, bewilderment, and dislocation. This behaviour is often misunderstood by these supposedly trained people, as being a permanent disturbance. Despite their training, in my experience, many teachers feel threatened by disturbed children and tend to be biased against them. This accounts for the extremely large number of West Indian children who are submitted for assessment by the teachers not on grounds of intellectual capacity, but because they are ‘a bloody nuisance’. And dozens of teachers have admitted this to me.
This temporary disturbance of children due to the emotional shocks they have suffered may well take on a permanent form, however, when the nature of their problem and their consequent needs are misunderstood, and instead they face an educational environment which is humiliating and rejecting. While suffering emotional turmoil they are placed in unfamiliar testing situations, to do unfamiliar and culturally biased tests, with white examiners whose speech is different, whom they have been brought up to identify as the ‘master calss’, and before whom they expect to fail. They then experience the test, only to have their fears confirmed, when they are removed from normal schools—in their mind, ‘rejected’—and placed in the neighbourhood ‘nut’ school. And it must be remembered…that 20 percent (that is, one-fifth) of all the immigrant pupils in six of their secondary ESN schools had been admitted to the Special School without being given a trial in ordinary school first.”
Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.
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