Assimilation and Education in England

Assimilation in England

In England, cultural assimilation is a one-way process in which immigrant groups come to practice the majority culture in a manner that involves the least amount of change in the customs and institutional policies of the dominant culture. It can also be described as a one-way process of absorption, whereby minorities abandon—at least publicly—their ethnic identities. This approach, which regards diversity as a problem and cultural differences as socially divisive, raises two salient issues: First, minority or oppressed groups could resist or be excluded from this one-way process through social segregation and separation from the majority culture. The second issue, which is educational, concerns both children and parents and their potential resistance to school structures and the curriculum taught in the classroom. As discussed further below, assimilation policy was used in the past to highlight the “problems of education,” which indicted minority children and parents rather than the education system itself. As Richard Race points out in Multiculturalism and Education, social and education policy in England during the 1990s and 2000s has helped create a system of education that is closer to a two-way conditional relationship between the state and the individual or community. An integrationist approach, rather than assimilationism or multiculturalism, has therefore shaped education policy making in England.

Assimilationist social and educational policies in England can be traced back to the 1960s. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act began the process of stemming the flow of immigrants, which had begun in earnest at the end of World War II. The end of a global migrant flow—not just from Commonwealth countries—forced the government to consider the social consequences of immigrants living, and not just working, in the United Kingdom. As Sally Tomlinson reports in Race and Education: Policy and Politics in Britain, the government was simultaneously faced with the need to encourage postwar immigrant laborers to conform, and to devise social policies that would control immigrants, both while offering immigrant children an education that would provide future generations of immigrants with employment. Most parents who migrated to Britain from the Caribbean and the Asian subcontinent saw educational success for their children as of vital importance, and were anxious about how the English education system was treating their children. Parents from minority communities were also worried about their children being placed in low subject streams—meaning within an English context that students were being placed in remedial departments and in subjects such as home economics, which did not have the same status or require the qualifications as sciences such as biology and chemistry. Minority parents protested to the Race Relations Board.

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