The Swann Report
French lessons
Richard West
The Swann Committee, which failed to discover in six years why West Indian children 'under-achieve' in British schools, should have taken a look at comparable schools in France, or the West Indies. In France, the children of immigrants from Martinique and Guadeloupe are absorbed without problem into the education sytem, as are the Vietnamese and Cambodians. It is the children of North African immigrants who 'under-achieve'. Indeed, opinion polls in France show 'there is no immigration problem, only an Arab problem'.
In France, unlike Britain, the schools make no effort to help immigrant children by teaching them their own culture, or in their own languages. In fact even the present Socialist government has now re- jected the kind of progressive permissive ideas on education which are the norm in Britain. From about the time of the trou- bles in 1968, a great many young teachers brought in the modish ideas of structural- ism, feminism, Trotskyism and so forth, and when the Socialists got into power in 1981, it looked as though this new ortho- doxy would rule French schools, as it does ours. The French public protested in no uncertain fashion, leading up to a mass demonstration at the Bastille. The govern- ment withdrew its plans to get rid of Catholic schools. Then it changed pplicy on teaching in state schools. The Educa- tion Minister, M. Jean-Pierre Chevene- ment, who leads the Marxist 'Ceres' wing of the Socialist Party, has called for 'elit- ism' and discipline in French schools. Last week he expressed his determination to give the country 'strong, quality elementary schools, ensuring essential elementary preparation for their pupils'. Under Chevenement's proposal training will be given in spoken and written French, with emphasis on spelling. Mathematics will return to the four basics: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Geography and history are to be brought back, the latter with emphasis on dates and events. And we can be sure that emphasis will be given to events in one particular country — la France, naturellement. French Socialists, unlike their English counter- parts, are unabashedly proud of their own country, language, culture and history.
This does not mean that the French are `racialist'. From 'opinion polls, as from ordinary conversation, one gets the im- pression that most French actually like West Indians, and still more the Viet- namese, largely because those people have learned to speak good French and to adopt French customs. The North Africans, on the whole, have not. The main trouble with the Arabs,' one constantly hears, 'is that there's too many of them.' Answers to a questionnaire by readers of Le Nouvel Observateur, a left-wing weekly, showed that two-thirds believed that immigrants should adopt French customs and culture.
The West Indians do well in France largely because the two main islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique, are still run by France, although technically they are departements rather than colonies. Both islands are prosperous and their schools are of course run the same way as those in mainland France. Although the islanders include a small number of Rastafarians, `Back to Africa' maniacs, and even politic- al terrorists, most of them are conserva- tive. They returned the largest anti- Socialist vote of anywhere in France at the last Presidential election. French people say that the Antillean people are so patrio- tic that when a child is born on, to take one instance, Bastille Day, he may be called ' Fête Nat', for the ab- breviated 'Fête nationale' marked in the calendar.
Most of the West Indians in Britain come from Jamaica, where education, like everything else, has collapsed since indep- endence. The island is bankrupt, anarchic, violent, dangerous and drugged — as Auberon Waugh described last week. Jamaica suffered from the misfortune of being ruled for a time by an archetypal Loony, Michael Manley, a friend and indeed rather a look-alike of our own Anthony Wedgwood Benn. When they met in London a year or so back, Benn pronounced his warm admiration for Man- ley's remark that 'Socialism is Love'. Thanks largely to the Manley regime, a whole generation of young Jamaicians has grown up uneducated, ill-disciplined and therefore unemployable. Perhaps a third of the population have left Jamaica. Those who went to Canada or the United States, including a high proportion of the profes- sional class, have managed to get their children a good education. Jamaicans in England find the schools run on Manley principles. Yet some of the former British West Indian countries still have excellent schools. If the Swann Committee had gone to Grenada, they would have seen classes of children in spotlessly clean uniforms {the girls with bows in their hair), atten- tive, disciplined, polite and eager to learn, under the tutelage of strict but good- humoured teachers — paid only a pittance by British standards. The schools in Grena- da are run by the churches, which indeed dominate life on the island. The churches continued to run the schools even during the foolish and tragic Marxist regime of Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard.
If the Swann Committee had gone to Grenada, they might have observed that Coard is now on trial for the murder of Bishop, his former friend; that Grenadians, in their recent election, demonstrated their utter rejection of everything Coard be- lieved, including his views on education. Many Grenadians living in England send their children back to the island to get a proper education, with discipline. An Eng- lishwoman living in Grenada told me how delighted she was with the education her child gets at a local school. One does not often hear Englishwomen in England saying that.
When I was in Grenada I sat in on a class held in the Anglican Church, where the schoolmistress gave a lecture on the virtues of reading and homework, and then held an election for prefects, calling herself `Madam Chairman'. Last week I read about St Mark's Church of England Prim- ary School in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, where they have readings from the Koran and learn Urdu. According to the Guar- dian report under the heading `Swansong for Christian way of learning': 'Classroom religion is welded into various projects. Studies on water would include Christ's changing of water into wine and the spir- itual importance of the Ganges.' Perhaps I shall emigrate to France, or better still Grenada.
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