Babylon by Bus?: The dispersal of immigrant children in England, race and urban space (1960s–1980s)

• Olivier Esteves ^[1]
  1. [1] Lille University, Lille, France
• Localización: Paedagogica Historica: International journal of the history of education, ISSN 0030-9230, Vol. 54, Nº. 6, 2018, págs. 750-765
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • The history of forced dispersal of immigrant children in England, which affected mostly non-Anglophone Asian pupils in areas such as Southall (West London) and Bradford (West Yorkshire) in the 1960s and 1970s has only very recently elicited the interest of historians. Mobilising archival material as well as interviews with formerly bussed pupils, this paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on the education and integration of immigrant children in Britain. This it does by appraising dispersal policies from the point of view of State and bureaucratic simplifications wherein the Department of Education and Science urgently introduced some policies to assuage white fears of an immigrant takeover locally (Southall). It focuses on perceptions of “tax-payers rights”, at the heart of white autochthonous appreciations of the education system itself but which was largely denied to immigrant parents. Lastly, it analyses the extent to which, for the bussed pupils, racism on the playground was a lived norm, before studying the way how memories of bussing have shaped the interviewees’ identities in the long term