Tests And Racism

Test Results

I was reminded of something I did when teaching at Summerhill by a post by friend Roy Terry on Facebook. Roy's post was a warning against testing children too early. He was quite right, I thought, but with reservations. The problem I see is not so much in the tests themselves, provided there aren't too many of them, but in the treatment of the results.

At Summerhill, wanting to know how much of what I had been teaching the kids had actually been understood, I told them I would give them a test. Consternation all round! We don't have tests at Summerhill, I was told. So I explained why I wanted to give them a test and said they needn't take it if they didn't want to. In the event, all the classs did take it and I corrected their papers and returned them. More consternation! I hadn't given them any scores and they wanted to know who had come first, last, etc. I said I didn't know and wasn't interested; I'd found out what I wanted to know, which was what they had understood and what they hadn't. They hadn't wanted to take the test because they had been afraid of being ranked low but, having taken the test, wanted to know how they were ranked. The test taught me that kids had learned to expect test results to rank them and, possibly, show they had succeeded or failed. But I see no reason why that should be so. In the general education system it is so only because the authorities want league tables and tick boxes which, in my view, have very little to do with education (or anything at all come to that, except tick boxes and meaningless numbers).

Racism In The UK

Post Brexit there has been a measurable and worrying increase in the UK of race-related hate crimes. That disturbs me and tends to confirm my suspicion that the referendum result was basically decided by at best xenophobia and at worst outright racism. Many Leave voters have said that it was not immigration but taking back control that was the key issue for them; but taking back control of what? Theresa May seems clear that the message was to take back control of the borders; and what does that mean? It means keeping out foreigners.

Most of the popular press in the UK which campaigned for a Leave vote is now engaged in what I can only describe as incitement to race hatred. Positive stories on immigrants are simply not reported and any negative stories, however singular, are given headlines with implications that such stories are widespread. This has an exact analogy with Germany in the 1930s and the rise of Hitler and I think any decent lawyer could make a good case for a complaint to IPSO, the Press Complaints body, for inciting race hatred. There are laws in the UK against that so why has no complaint (to my knowledge) been made? There's no prima facie case, the popular press is too clever for that, but I can't see how the cumulative body of evidence could lead to any other conclusion. Maybe it's a question of who has the will and the courage.

As an ironic footnote, recent figures show that the UK has more emigrants in Europe than any other European country. In other words, the UK has more immigrants in other European countries than other European countries have elsewhere. So who exactly is against immigration?