STANDARDS, STIGMA, SURVEILLANCE: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England’s Schools 
by Ian Cushing, Palgrave Macmillan, £35.99

IN THE Kenyan David Mulwa’s compelling 1979 novel of anti-colonial reality and resistance, Master and Servant, the young protagonist Kituku beholds for the first time the large sign over the door of his classroom: “In this school you must speak English. Avoid vernacular, it makes you stupid.”
    
As I read Ian Cushing’s account of raciolinguistic ideologies and England’s schools, entitled Standards, Stigma, Surveillance, and imbibed his descriptions of nonstandard codes of pupils’ languages being forbidden, pathologised and marked out as delinquency — with notices on England’s schools’ corridors listing “banned words and phrases” — my mind went back to Mulwa’s gripping narrative. 
    
Suddenly it had a sharp relevance to now-times English education, so much of which is in the grip of privatised moulds of the Labour-instigated academy system.

Cushing’s intention is to show that in mainstream English schools a standardised English speech is the vehicle of raciolinguistic oppression at the expense of all other registers, be they first languages, dialects or creole vernaculars. It is contrived by the state to humiliate and destroy all other registers of language and remake them in the image of a colonial aggressor. 

It’s a powerful argument, lucidly and persuasively made in his profoundly unsettling and intricately researched book. 

Indeed, for me as a lifelong teacher of English in both English urban settings and revolutionary contexts in Africa and the Caribbean, his insights affected me with a particular salience. 

The truth is that the double-pronged assault on our schools by the academy system and a decade and a half of continuous Tory misrule, has left English schools in dire and reactionary conditions, intensified by backward models of school leadership and Ofsted persecution.

Cushing convincingly shows how systematic oversight of teaching methodologies has pressurised teachers to become agents of “sonic surveillance” over themselves and their students. 

Rather than the multiplicity of languages registers being welcomed as liberators of words for millions of our young people, teachers have been forced into the role of “language police” to ensure that nothing is expressed unless it is expressed in standardised English. 

Such is the “raciolinguistic” reality of many “model” English academies and their policies of “linguistic gatekeeping,” with the consequent “othering” of non-standardised English speakers, predominantly from black and working-class communities. 

As Cushing maintains: “The imposition of standardised language and the uncritical treatment of it within schools is therefore deeply embedded with the reproduction of racial and class prejudices, stigma and surveillance.”

He investigates the history of such state strategies and finds them consonant with past policies of eugenics and the labelling of black children as “educationally subnormal.”

Just as black communities and teachers resisted to overcome these deformities, he stresses too how many contemporary teachers, students and parents are rejecting present-day distortions. Yet structurally, little will change until the Tory and academy system grip on our schools is removed, for “raciolinguistic ideologies are a central girder in the upholding of social inequality.”

As an ex- teacher of English, like thousands of others now working their brains out in the midst of dire national educational leadership, I have always sought to broaden and deepen my students’ knowledge of all varieties of English from so-called “common” and “proper” (as my parents used to say) registers of language. That includes giving figurative and academic power to the enormous scope of multilingualism in our schools, be they first languages and mother tongues, and whether that be Bengali, Panjabi, Arabic, Somali, Romany, Caribbean creole vernaculars, London Cockney, Mancunian, Geordie or Sheffieldese. All this while striving to increase the unifying power, efficacy and range of standard English. 

We need all our words, learned in a democratic, inclusive spirit of meaning and reason, clarity, empathy and imaginative truth.

No register of speech, learning or self-expression must ever be discounted, as it was during British colonial rule or when, for example, the Canadian churches robbed indigenous communities of their languages as they locked up their children in their residential schools. 

As the Mi’kmaq poet Rita Joe told us:

I lost my talk
The talk you took away
When I was a little girl
At Shubenacadie School.
You snatched it away.

I urge you to read Cushing’s very timely book, but before doing so, read Mulwa’s startling novel. This is because, read together, they show how colonial history is returning, even in the guts of the ex-colonisers’ own schools in the midst of our cities. 

It is a truth which British Toryism welcomes and applauds with the cruel hubris of vicious imperial nostalgia.