Black schools is a bad idea

Lee Jasper, the controversial race advisor of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone has called for the creation of “black schools” in a bid to raise attainments and cut gang violence.

Jasper argues that there are Muslim schools, Jewish schools and now a Hindu school and that the black community will benefit from its own schools with a focused curriculum delivered by black teachers. Jasper’s comments come after a study revels that black children were less likely to be entered for higher-tier science and maths exams because of low teacher expectations.

Jasper qualifies his comments saying that great black leaders like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela all black schools and universities but the reason they attended all black schools was because they had no other option at the time. Not only that, they then spent the rest of their lives campaigning against them. Positive discrimination is still discrimination and it is as racist and abhorrent as any system that chooses to define people by such superficial features as their colour of skin. For the most part, Britain is still an open-minded society and not racist and I cannot see how all-black schools would solve the crisis within the black community. Jasper is doing black children a disservice by suggesting that they can only learn from black teachers. I am Asian and most of my teachers were white, some black whilst others Asian who taught me and I learnt from them and it made no difference what the colour of their skin was.

Scary isn’t it that this man once bent the ear of the London mayor.