Bernard Coard

If you've seen Steve McQueen's Small Axe quintet on Amazon Prime through to its end, the fifth film Education has already exposed you to this book, which began its life as a pamphlet for parents in Britain whose children had been wrongly assigned to schools for the "educationally sub-normal." At one point in that moving film, one of the characters supplies another with the first edition of the primary text republished here in 2021, 50 years after its original publication.

Bernard Coard began a movement with this work, and children of all ethnicities in Britain have benefitted from that movement. If you work in education, especially with struggling students in inner-city schools in the United States, you will recognize many of the strategies used to sideline and generally limit the horizons of Black and Brown children. And this book may remind you that their struggle is your struggle, and that we owe it to children to work harder for and do better by them. That's the message of this book, and it should depress any thoughtful citizen that this message appears to be timeless.… (more)