AND IT CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING.

Sara Salyers

In 2010, living in the USA, not far from Knoxville, Tennessee, I joined a large community college as an adjunct faculty member of its Transitional Studies Department. This department was dedicated to helping ’remedial’ students to reach the academic standard required for college entry, (the eqivalent of our HNC level). 

My task was to get my students to a level of literary and oral proficiency in ’standard English’ that twelve years of primary and secondary education had failed to produce. And I had just sixteen weeks to do it. The problem with these students, my colleagues explained, was that they were ‘not academic’, not ‘college material’, deficient in some intrinsic way that meant that, as one well meaning faculty member told me, ‘They shouldn’t really be here’.

My students not only understood fully that they were regarded as ‘inferior’ candidates, they had come to regard themselves in the same way. “Not very bright” was the way one young woman described herself – entirely inaccurately as it turned out. Their personal college profiles, available to their lecturers as an aid to assisting them, listed their “deficits”. The things we had to fix.

To cut a long story short, I decided that this narrative was both unacceptable and unreasonable. So instead of trying to fix their deficits, I set about trying to fix the story. I threw out the prescribed syllabus and designed my own, something that cause more than a little consternation and even uproar within my department when it came to light. And my own was based on these  questions: What if none of these students, apart from those with specific learning disabilities, was in any way intellectually less able than any other college student? What if they had no ‘deficits’ but merely artificial, mental blocks to success? What if, in fact, they could be and do anything at all they chose? And, if all that is true, what is actually stopping them?

The answer, as I proved with a success rate that earned me an ‘outstanding adjunct’, college and national award, was that what was stopping them was the very system which required them to succeed. It demanded that they do so in the teeth of rules, conventions and methods that made it impossible. The educational system in which they had struggled and failed to progress for most of their young lives was a stacked deck from the first. 

As Jack Whitehead who founded the Living Educational Theory movement told me, this is a form of internal colonisation. Educational colonisation, he explained, is the imposition of a foreign worldview, foreign sets of values, foreign language or language variant on any population by a superior power which automatically classes as inferior any culture, langauge ro social group which differs from itself. The greater the divergence from the colonising group, the greater the inferiority of the divergent population. 

Colonisation of the mind, perhaps of the spirit, is what happens to all children who are forced to learn in the context of modes of thought and emphasis, (ways of thinking and understanding the world), unlike anything in their own, direct experience. They are forced to learn to write, speak and read about a foreign culture, from within the conventions and value systems of this foreign culture and in a foreign langauge, an ‘English’ they neither speak nor hear daily. 

The effect is a passive acceptance of inevitable failure. An internalised sense of inferiority, of inherent deficiency, not merely in their own ability but in their very identities. (That deficiency is implicitly shared by the families and communities who obviously suffer from the same fundamental inferiority.) A sense of shame develops, which is expressed in anything from a crippling self-doubt at one end of the scale to what we call a ‘chip on the shoulder’ at the other. There is a natural resistance to undergoing repeated failure that becomes both ‘I can’t’ and ‘I don’t want to’. A deep rejection of the coloniser and the coloniser’s measures of success, (a rejection that goes unexamined and impossible to articulate), sits side by side with the experience of being absolutely powerless to do anything about it. The end result is a cycle of failure and learned helplessness, of personal and communal shame, of internalised anger and acceptance, subordination. 

Now, apply all of that to Scotland, not only to our children, from primary school on but to the measures of ‘success’ which are set up for every working adult. Apply it not only to the lived experience of colonised children who become colonised adults, but of the entire nation as a collection of communities, all living the same experience. Conditioned to believe that they have no power to change the experience of failure, that they are (and this is deeply hidden within us), shamefully inferior. This is the source of what Professor Baird calls, ‘the Scottish cringe factor’.  Just as for my many brilliant but permanently labelled, ‘remedial students’: there is no real point in trying; there must always be someone to authorise the attempt; it is always dangerous and sometimes impossible to think your own thoughts or have your own ideas, in your own way and outside the prescribed lines; it is impossible to express these thoughts and ideas in your own language. We are controlled, coralled and impotent.

The good news is that I did find a way to reempower my students. First I showed them exactly how human beings really learn and why the design of the education system shuts down the ability to think critically or make ‘executive decisions’. I showed them the colonisation. I helped them describe and become – justly – angry about their experiences. And then move on. I reduced ‘academic success’ to no more than a skillset for navigating a members-only club of establishment opportunity. We celebrated our own communities and cultures and discovered the very superior qualities that they did, in fact possess. Together, we threw off an invisible, crippling control exerted by an invisible colonisation. 

An almost identical task faces Scotland today. There is no nation without a people. There is no independent nation wthout an independent people. A tiny group of independent politicans making ‘independent’ decisions on our behalf is not independence. And it does not, cannot, lead to true independence. Independence means independence of thought, confidence in our identity, rejection of that foreign ‘members club’ and pride in our own. It means replacing the sense of exclusion and inferiority with a sense of belonging and self worth. And from all of that comes empowerment, an unstoppable certainty and determination in place of the ‘cringe’ and the cap in hand mindset. 

This must take place person by person, community by community until it is a national phenomenon. The empowerment of the individual, the community and the combined communities which make up a nation, is what we call both decolonisation and independence. There cannot be one without the other. Impossible? Before your heart sinks at the prospect of reversing the condition of our Scottish, national psyche, think about this. I saw a lifetime of learned helplessness and academic failure reversed in 16 weeks, semester after semester. The only ‘miracle’ required was that someone recognised the real root of the problem. Once you have a diagnosis, after all, you can prescribe a cure. Without it, you are doomed to try to fix the ‘wrong’ problems.

Our cure? It begins with the recognition of the lies that weaponise colonisation and it takes effect with the restoration of a national identity, confidence and belonging. National identity and belonging leads to a powerful will to protect and reestablish it. And that leads inevitably to independence. There is not, and never has been, a successful independence movement without this, which is why the message at the heart of Salvo and Liberation, a message contained in the Edinburgh Proclamation, in our Scottish constitution, our political valules and the rights we assert, is so important. It says, ‘This is who we are as a people, yesterday, today and tomorrow’. And it can change everything.

MY COMMENTS

When I read an article like this it makes me very proud to be part of these organisations Salvo, Liberation and the Scottish National Congress that are working so hard to spread this message, to challenge and change the colonial process in Scotland. It is hugely enjoyable as I witness the great progress in such a short period of time. The Claim of Right is now an established part of the Independence conversation and it causes no end of problems for those who wish to stop any question of exposing their controls. As I write I cannot tell you about some new campaigns because we are having them checked by legal experts but I am very hopeful we will get a green light soon. Very soon.

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