"I cannot conceive of a school anywhere else in the world where the mother language is not allowed to be spoken on campus. These boys are segregated from Africa. If a boy loses contact with his culture, who is he?" - An American teacher, at a Kenyan school, in Ken Loaches banned Save the Children Fund.
Not having seen the film, I lifted the quote from the Daily Mail story on it, that just screamed out.
The documentary may date from 1969, but aren't those words prophetic of exactly what has happened in Britain today?
We have schools where the English language is a minority, drowned out under the weight of forty other foreign tongues.
There are schools which are more a part of Pakistan, or Bangladesh, than they are of England, where the white English face is a mere speck amidst a crowd of other peoples.
Is that English child, a minority in the schoolyard, not segregated from England?
Has he or she been forced to utterly lose touch with English culture?
Who is he or she?
How can that child be expected to know who they are when everything is a mass of clamouring, competing cultures, where England and the English language is but one minority among a crowd and drowned out by the louder cries of the diverse multitude?
Sadly we can conceive of such schools where the indigenous child is segregated from their own culture and country - we can see them all around England, they are the norm now.
How can the child schooled in that environment have an identity or a clue who they are, how can they be anything else other than a piecemeal construct from dozens of different, contradictory, and chaotic cultures?
That child has lost contact with his culture, and instead become a mirror for other cultures, left with no identity to call his or her own.
It is a travesty worth highlighting in a documentary that an African child was denied his heritage and culture, but it is being done to our children here today, every day, and nobody says a word.
This is the legacy of the failed multicultural experiment, children who are segregated from England, who have lost touch with their culture.
In the name of diversity they were betrayed, robbed of who they are and who they would grow up to be, truly segregated from the culture that was rightfully theirs.
"I cannot conceive of a school anywhere else in the world where the mother language is not allowed to be spoken on campus. These boys are segregated from Africa. If a boy loses contact with his culture, who is he?" - An American teacher, at a Kenyan school, in Ken Loaches banned Save the Children Fund.
