19、Race and education
Black marks
Mar 10th 2005 From The Economist print edition
It’s the natives, not the immigrants, that are the problem Alamy
WHITE people tend to be nervous of raising the subject of race and education, but are often voluble on the issue if a black person brings it up. So when Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, said that there was a particular problem with black boys’ performance at school, and that it might be a good idea to educate them apart from other pupils, there was a torrent of comment. Some of it commended his proposal, and some criticised it, but none of it questioned its premise. Everybody accepts that black boys are a problem.
On the face of it, it looks as though Mr Phillips is right. Only 27% of Afro-Caribbean boys get five A-C grades at GCSE, the exams taken by 16-year-olds, compared with 47% of boys as a whole and 44% of Afro-Caribbean girls. Since, in some subjects, candidates who score less than 50% get Cs, those who don’t reach this threshold have picked up pretty little at school.
Mr Phillips’s suggestion that black boys should be taught separately implies that ethnicity and gender explain their underachievement. Certainly, maleness seems to be a disadvantage at school. That’s true for all ethnic groups: 57% of girls as a whole get five A-Cs, compared with 47% of boys. But it’s not so clear that blackness is at the root of the problem.
Among children as a whole, Afro-Caribbeans do indeed perform badly. But Afro-Caribbeans tend to be poor. So to get a better idea of whether race, rather than poverty, is the problem, one must control for economic status. The only way to do that, given the limits of British educational statistics, is to separate out the exam results of children who get free school meals: only the poor get free grub.
Poor children’s results tell a rather different story. Afro-Caribbeans still do remarkably badly, but whites are at the bottom of the pile. All ethnic minority groups do better than them. Even Bangladeshis, a pretty deprived lot, do twice as well as the natives in their exams; Indians and Chinese do better still. And absolute numbers of underperforming whites dwarf those of underperforming Afro-Caribbeans: last year, 131,393 of white boys failed to hit the government’s benchmark, compared with 3,151 Afro-Caribbean boys.
These figures suggest that, at school at least, black people’s problem is not so much race as poverty. And they undermine the idea of teaching black boys separately, for if poor whites are doing worse than poor blacks, there’s not much argument for singling out blacks for special measures: whites need help just as badly.
It’s a nice thought
This isn’t, however, a message that anybody much wants to hear. Many white people find the idea that there’s something fundamentally wrong with black people comforting: it confirms deeply held prejudices and reassures them that a whole complex of social problems—starting with underachievement in schools, but leading on to unemployment, drug addiction and crime—is nothing to do with them.
The race-relations industry also has an interest in explaining educational underachievement in terms of ethnicity. A whole raft of committees, commissions and task forces has been set up on the assumption that racial differences are a fundamental cause of social problems. If that’s wrong, then all those worthies might as well pack up and go home.
Trying to explain educational underachievement away as a racial issue may be comforting and convenient, but it is also dangerous, for it distracts attention from the real problem—that the school system fails the poor. That’s not a black problem or a white problem: it’s a British problem.
19、提到种族和教育问题，白人们都会有些紧张，不过如果是一个黑人提起这个话题，白人们就会滔滔不绝。英国种族平等委员会主席 Trevor Phillips 一提到黑人男孩子在学校表现的特殊问题、并认为将他们和其他学生分开教育兴许是个好主意时，就有一连串的意见和建议。其中有的赞成，有的持批评态度，不过没人质疑问题的起因。个个都承认黑人男孩子是个问题。
从表面来看， Mr Phillips 好像是对的。仅有27% 的非洲–加勒比裔男孩在16 岁孩子参加的 GCSE 考试中得了A到C的成绩，相比之下，男孩整体上是47% ，而非洲 – 加勒比裔女孩则是44% 。由于在某些科目中，得分低于50%的人会得C，学校里达不到这一程度的学生就更是微乎其微了。
Mr Phillips 建议黑人男孩应当单独接受教育意味着种族和性别决定了他们智商低。当然，男生在学校里确实是处在下峰，所有种族都是如此：全部女孩中有57%得到了5个A到C的分数，而男孩则只有47% 。然而问题的根源是否在于黑人孩子，就不是很清楚了。
就孩子们整体而言，非洲–加勒比裔的确表现不佳，可是他们也同样相对贫穷。因此深入了解是否真的是种族、而不是贫穷，才是考虑经济地位所必须掌握的。由于英国教育统计方面的局限性，唯一的办法就是把享用学校免费膳食孩子的考试成绩区分出来：只有穷人能得到免费食物。
穷人孩子的成绩说明了一个更加不同一般的问题。非洲 – 加勒比裔孩子仍然非常糟糕，不过白人却排在最后，所有少数族裔都比白人表现好。即使是相当缺衣少食的孟加拉裔，在考试中也比本土白人好两倍;印度裔和华裔就更好了。而且表现不佳的白人的绝对数字也远远超过非洲–加勒比裔：去年， 131,393 个白人男孩子没能达到政府规定的标准，非洲–加勒比裔则只有 3,151 个。
这些数字说明，至少在学校，黑人的问题在于贫穷，而不是种族;而且还打破了单独教育黑人男孩子的观念，因为如果贫穷的白人比贫穷的黑人表现差，就不会为挑出黑人孩子特殊对待而广为争议了：白人孩子正是因为表现糟糕而需要帮助。
很好的想法
然而，这并不是一则人人都愿意听的消息。很多白人都认为这个对黑人有根本性错误的认识很令人欣慰：深刻证实了一些固有的偏见，并且让他们更加心安理得地认为一个诸多社会问题的复杂整体(起源于学校里孩子们表现不佳，但延续下来导致失业、毒品成瘾及犯罪等)和他们毫无关系。
种族关系部门也对以种族划分来解释教育中的成绩不好问题颇有兴趣。一个由委员会、机构及专门工作组组成的救急机构已经建立起来了，前提是种族差异是社会问题的基本原因。如果这是错的，那么所有那些知名人士们还不如卷起铺盖、回家算了。
试图将教育成果不佳推卸为种族问题可能是既令人欣慰又让人感到便捷，不过也同样很危险，因为这将人们的视线从真正的问题转移开来 — 学校系统放弃了穷人。那就既不是黑人的问题、也不是白人的问题：而是一个英国的问题。
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