How Can He Love Learning But Hate Education?
The account I have written is simply a personal essay on my time in British education, not academia backed with research.
In the weeks before I was to graduate from university, I was plagued by visions of failure — of disappointing my family — yes, even my late aunt who believed in me since childhood. That at the last possible moment, my hard work would be somehow be taken away from me. Now, I realise these visions were not a fear of failure, but a fear of success. In hindsight, I know that this was some sort of imposter syndrome. I was afraid of passing, breaking my routine and having to get used to something new or different.
Instead of being happy with my 2.1, I was smothered by a cloud of guilt. A depression. That I didn’t believe I deserved this qualification because I hadn’t struggled enough to get it. I got into university through clearing because I didn’t have the grades (I don’t exam well). After that, my experience was seamless with no hiccups and due to this, I was suspicious, skipping graduation because I didn’t believe I had done enough to warrant a degree.
I did share these thoughts with a confidant who said, “that obtaining any degree is an achievement.” My interests in race would take me into a student union officer position for a year, where I witnessed an apartheid of sorts between the various ethnic groups of students. Moreover, where academics talked about “good degrees” — that a first or 2.1 is a good degree, so did that make a 2.2 or a third a bad degree? I never heard the term “bad degree” but the pejorative language of degrees in relation to the award gaps for students that looked exactly like me could well play in to why I had visions of failure.
However, I remember at school being told I would never amount to anything and that I would never go to university, especially in the UK where I am 26% less likely than a White student to achieve a first- or second-class degree. From childhood, I recall thinking of myself as a failure because I didn’t exam well, often scraping Ds at best. And that productivity in schoolchildren was valued as much as the grades you produce at GCSE or A-Level, in addition for me, at a private school taking the Common Entrance examinations.
I really disliked school for school’s sake, from an institutional perspective where hegemony was valued after than a child’s happiness. Nonetheless, my family history is tied to teaching and I had to make them proud.
It wasn’t until I went to a Saturday School in the mid-noughties that I saw the value of education and how as Black people my mother and godmother were giving back to their community, the Black community, the local community of Black Caribbeans in Northamptonshire. And to teach children about themselves, their history and identity was a revolutionary act. A political act in a time (we’re still in this time) where the state fails Black children. In 1971, Grenadian politician Bernard Coard’s How the West Indian Child is made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System was published.
And I truly believe British education made me think myself sub-normal. I don’t think my experience of the British school system is because I went to private school, since my colleagues that went through the state system talk about similar things, including a feeling of unbelonging and worthlessness. Yet, I felt like I belonged at Saturday School being taught by people who looked like me. This is what I longed for, to be able to learn in an environment that didn’t react hostilely to hard topics, including race and identity politics of Black pre-adolescent youth. I felt I could ask these questions on Saturdays.
Now I know that teaching in Black communities is rooted in this buzzterm of universities — antiracism — rooted in the anticolonial fight. Learning as resistance.
My mother and godmother starting the Garvey Saturday School showed me that Black people were more than White stereotypes of us suggest. Not stupid or docile, but feeding intellect and critical thought so that we can liberate our minds in a society designed for whiteness. Also, role models, particularly Black men are important in showing Black boys that they can be something other than what the state suggests. Now, I understand that learning for Black people is a completely different experience to learning for White people, for us a way of countering racist colonisation, even in the 21st century.
Having worked at a university seeing how students from Black backgrounds are treated, almost set up to fail in institutions that were not designed for them in the first place. I’m by no means saying that Black students aren’t capable of passing, just the system as it stands benefits whiteness. Whilst individual lecturers do what they can to inspire students; to uplift Black students as Black men and women by Black academics could be interpreted as rocking the boat, controversial, radical pedagogy, daring to challenge (White) institutional schools of thought.
At universities, unlike at Saturday schools, lecturers don’t know all of their students. They don’t know their families, their economic status, their homelife and how they were treated at home within the familial structure. Do institutions try to understand cultures different from the White dominant culture of Britain? When institutions think in number worship, they see little value in harvesting relationships. I have met many lecturers that know their students, but how do you do that in a year group of four hundred?
I really didn’t enjoy being a student because I felt like just £9000 per year. I had to conform to White norms of thought on my Creative Writing degree where we mainly studied texts written by White people for White people, and when we read anything written by people of colour, they were about slavery, immigration and poverty. Whilst White students had all numbers of positive role models in the texts we read, I didn’t have the privilege of self-identity.
Home was where I got to be myself. University, I couldn’t be true to who I was. In my third year, in the wake of Rhodes Must Fall and Brexit, I began to hear chat about that awful term, “tolerance”, and knowledge was on a need-to-know basis. The institution did not seem to want to know its students like the schools in the Caribbean do. No hunger for knowledge on culture, creed or class. No want to know their personalities. But quick name “antiracism” but simultaneously dropping hefty fines on Black students in disciplinary panels.
In White schools, or universities (despite sometimes being the majority), Black students learn to obey. That disobedience is met with discipline and a will to learn can be seen as aggressive, one more example of Black insurrection to White authority. Is this a university or is history cyclical, churning on and on, repeating itself?
Going through the private system as a youth five days a week with one day at Saturday school, I was pitting the colonial against the anticolonial in my own head, leaving a world for one day to learn about myself and the politics of being Black in a White world (despite people of colour being the global majority). But I was taught five days a week by teachers reinforcing racist stereotypes, particularly in arts and humanities subjects. University was no different. For this Black child, my experience has never been about learning, but learning what’s acceptable to say. This is what made me want to educate others in the ways I have, through poetry or even going into schools as a speaker and giving them an inkling of things, they won’t learn at school.
My brother is twelve years old, in his prime to be learning the foundations of politics. The hows, the whys and the wheres of politics. Which begs the question, why are schools (which are political places) scared of that? At school, I had to combat White racist assumptions about people that looked like me but also discrimination based on class. I had to prove I wasn’t genetically inferior by sprinting faster than a White person or jumping higher. Now, we might call that pseudo-science / eugenics. That fact I was Special Educational Needs added fuel to their fire. Of course, it wasn’t all White people, but this response and reaction to whiteness is a tale as old as time.
I went into university wanting to be a writer. So naturally, I did a Creative Writing degree. Now in my role, I have witnessed a number of different courses which make me doubt whether I made the right choice. From Criminology to Childhood, it’s shown me that my interests intersect with a variety of disciplines with different attitudes towards different things. Whilst doing a Creative Writing degree was useful, was it the best use of my time? Yet, I would say it was binary. When I was a student, my course had many English modules badly in need of decolonising, with an uncomfortableness from lecturers on social issues, including race and its intersections with class.
Classrooms are still the most suitable places to have these conversations. If race and its links with the British Empire were a fundamental part of Britain’s school curricula, I may not be so adamant about it now. Yet, as Black students do not know themselves, being educated in White norms of thought in the UK education system (institutionally), they come to universities more lost than most. Their families will come from countries whose own education emulates Europe. Colonialism has a lot to answer for, toiling through education too. My Nigerian friends tell me how many Nigerians are still in defense of the British Empire. My grandparents grew up in the Caribbean learning about English monarchs, St. George and British politics.
Perhaps its time for us to see how we cannot do decolonial work without decolonising our minds first. We cannot do diversity work when our institutions are colonised and hostile to race. Whilst diversity is great, it wouldn’t do to send people of colour into the warzones plaguing institutions, including policing, government and higher education. Like ex-POTUS Jimmy Carter said, there’s a “crisis of confidence” and with the Black youth coming
