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Editor’s Thoughts: School Daze
The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has called for a 33% increase in black
teachers in the capital’s schools. Well overdue, I’d say. As I read a report on
his arguments for the case, I couldn’t help reflecting on my own school days.
t twelve my best friend was a boy named David who
“Like once, when under intense
lived across the road from us. He and I walked to school
light a dead boy struck me. I feel,
together, both worshipped Arsenal Football Club, went
I fell, I suffer still. And Time,
berry picking with his dad in summer, slept in each other’s house
as under a rock, trapped me there.” at weekends or pitched a tent in the back yard just for fun in
A
stormy weather. One day he became ‘an accidental skinhead’
when the barber gave him a lopsided haircut. I didn’t laugh like
the others when his white mate, Steve, said he looked like a
f**king plucked chicken. David went back next day and had his
head shaved. He never spoke to me again after Steve had his hair
cropped too, although I lived on the same road in the same
house and went to the same school for four more years. He
developed skinhead associations in steel-toed boots and drainpipe
denims.
This was the normal pattern of racial division in South London,
as we moved from the primary school innocence
of multi-racial friendships, into a comprehensive education
system reflecting the myriad concerns of a racist adult world.
Consequently, the black boys tended to band together, as did
the white lads, and the few asians. There was a safety in
numbers we felt.
Our particular band of boys shared the same interest in music
and in the white girls who showed us favour. We also shared our
teachers’ over-enthusiastic push for us to take up track and field
sports. We suffered their limited expectations of our potential
educational and vocational achievements: a point underlined by