I watched ‘Moana‘ the other night. Artistically beautiful but debatable cultural politics (for example see here).
I note this because it reminded me about ‘East is a Big Bird’ by Thomas Gladwin that I read ‘back in the day’ (It was published in 1970).
I just picked it up again after the film. A book of its time. It begins with a question that was hot then (in the 1960s): why do schools “…keep penalizing children for the poverty into which they have unwillingly been born…” He investigates this with a ‘study’ of the lives and seafaring expertise of pacific islanders while living among them.
How does this answer the queation … ? … read the book!
It’s a relevant question for educators today. The rise of endemic homelessness (which really began to take off under Thatcher) and widespread food and energy poverty is visible to all yet denied by politicians. Food and warmth – in a rich society such as ours everyone has some right to expect these.
In education, however, we seem to continue on basically the same path as Gladwin had observed (as did many educators at the time). While too many of today’s children endure the misery of poverty, national policy in education has been devoted into ensuring that the ineffective becomes more efficient, i.e. educating kids (and adults) in the same old discriminatory manner. We had hoped that was on the way out at the the end of the 1970s …
How wrong we were … *sobs quietly*
Postscipt: don’t take tis the wrong way. Terrific work is done all day and every day by thousands of teachers fighting the circumstances that constrain both them and their charges are in …