“What Is and What Might Be”

I want to take you on something of a journey.¹ My thread, not to lose our way, may sometimes be buried underfoot and not always immediately visible. But the thread—multi-twine, multicolored—is to raise some thoughts around “belonging,” including the question of whether we conceive of ourselves and our children primarily as members of a particular tribe or of a wider, diverse humanity linked by rights and responsibilities.

I would like to begin the journey over a hundred years ago. Can you imagine a chief inspector of schools today writing a book in which his opening sentence condemns our education system’s fixation with “outward and visible ‘results’” that he links to “the externalism of the West”?

My aim, in writing this book, is to show that the externalism of the West, the prevalent tendency to pay undue regard to outward and visible “results” and to neglect what is inward and vital, is the source of most of the defects that vitiate Education in this country.

(Holmes, “Preface”)

The “only remedy” for the defects, he says, is drastic. We have to change “our standard of reality and our conception of the meaning and value of life.” He goes on to propose a view of education profoundly influenced by Buddhism and ideas from the ancient East. He asks questions such as whether the teacher will

lead the child into the path of self-realization. ... Or will [the teacher], in his thirst for “results,” lead [the child] into the path of mechanical obedience, or, at best, of one-sided development, and so blight his budding faculties and arrest the growth of his soul?

(299)

Can we imagine a chief inspector today who would choose to debate how we educate our children in terms of ideas generated beyond the West?

Now I do not share the writer’s conception of civilizations being confined to East and West, with colonial-era notions about Africans and their descendants. But when he later goes on to describe “A School in Utopia”—based on an actual village elementary school—and its dedicated, imaginative head teacher, I recognize features of some of the book-loving schools that we authors are sometimes privileged to visit. It is the kind of school where you quickly sense affirmative principles of inclusion and where you meet children who appear, as in the writer’s “School in Utopia,” happy, responsive, overflowing with life, interested in many things, and full of ability and resource (161). He was especially impressed by children helping each other when some were struggling.

I wish I could take this chief inspector of a bygone era to a school that I recently visited in Brixton, south London, where Year 6 children have been reading my book The Other Side of Truth.

This is my novel about two young Nigerians whose lives are drastically changed when their mother is killed in an assassination attack aimed at their outspoken journalist father. In the course of reading, the Year 6 teachers took their classes to Victoria Station where they examined the location at which my characters Sade and Femi are shamefully deserted by the lady paid to smuggle them into Britain. The Year 6 children then looked for the Number 36 bus and followed Sade and Femi’s route in search of their Uncle Dele, who lectures at a London art college. “Is the London College of Art in your book based on Camberwell College of Art?” they asked. Beginning to explore links between fiction and reality, they were also beginning to wonder about the novel’s creation.

More questions flowed as I ate lunch with a group of children. Three questions remain with me. The first two reflect Britain’s deep divisions: “How many televisions do you have in your house?” asked one lad who seemed surprised when I replied, “One very old one that I hardly watch.” To another boy’s question, “Do you live in a palace?”, I answered no but later wondered whether my house and garden near the sea might not indeed seem palatial to a child in a cramped...