For many of us from immigrant backgrounds, the recent riots have brought back very unwelcome memories of times past, when blatant, in-your-face racial abuse was a daily reality across the UK. In my case, it led me to leaf through a manual I wrote with two colleagues over 30 years ago, “Essential Skills for Race Equality Trainers”, published by the National institute of Adult Continuing Education (which has now morphed into the Learning and Work Institute). We were determined to face up to the complexity of tackling racist ideas through structured training and “There are no simple answers” is a key theme.
Despite the complexity of the issue, one thing is clear, as the riots have reminded us. Racism can only be tackled by sustained, unrelenting action on several fronts; if we take our guard down and stop working actively against racism, it inevitably re-emerges. Like gardeners, we have to be constantly weeding, pruning, mowing, or the weeds and slugs of racist ideology will grow again.
Racism needs to be confronted on many fronts – economic, social, cultural, and through our criminal justice system. But in essence racism is a set of beliefs and attitudes based on misinformation; it’s something we learn, so it can be unlearned.
Education is therefore one of the most effective ways we can tackle racism in the long term. As the eminent neurologist Robert Sapolsky outlines in his brilliant book, “Behave” (Vintage 2017), we all have brains which can fall into Us versus Them thinking. One particular section of the brain, the amygdala, generates aggression, fear and rage, but these impulses can be contained and reduced by our rational capability, the frontal cortex, which is slow to mature – only fully developed in our mid-twenties – but strengthened through the mental discipline of education.
From a lifelong learning perspective, this has a number of implications. Firstly, the more education the better. From primary to tertiary, there has to be a concerted effort, not just to expose the misconceptions on which racism is based, but to strengthen students’ ability to apply rational thinking to the issue. Education is not a cure-all, but if delivered well can provide a powerful antidote to unreasoning prejudice.
Secondly, we need to ensure that all those delivering adult learning are skilled and confident in tackling issues of race and prejudice, alongside other “isms”. I’m not sure if we’re doing enough to prepare teachers and trainers for the challenge of teaching groups that contain students who share the attitudes displayed so openly by the rioters.
And what about the rioters themselves? They are a motley crew – tilers, electricians, unemployed, retired, many with histories of petty crime, many of them drug users - but one fact stands out: they are overwhelmingly white males of working age. They are a sub-set of a social group that do worse in education than all others. In 2021/22 only 14.5% of white male applicants eligible for free school meals went into higher education, compared to 24.4% of white females and 47.8% of Asian males with a similar level of disadvantage. Working class males do worse than almost all other groups at every stage of education, and despite this issue being debated for years, little progress has been made in improving the situation.
It’s time to redouble our efforts to engage more White men with adult education opportunities. In addition to the beneficial effect of improving thinking skills, access to education and training will also develop skills to enable progress in work and improve earnings, lowering the sense of frustration and resentment of those trapped in low-paid, insecure jobs, which is a breeding ground for racism.
To do this requires a concerted effort in “left behind” local areas by providers empowered to operate flexibly on the ground. The new government’s plans for greater devolution of adult skills budgets to localities, combined with the DWP’s new strategic drive to get people back to work, are both promising signs.
There will probably always be a small minority within our society detached from the usual norms of legal and decent behaviour and wedded to some form of racist ideology, but it’s in all our interests to ensure this is a tiny and impotent minority.
Lifelong education should lead the charge in achieving the goal of eradicating the mental disease of racism.
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