Review: Small Axe: Education (2020)

Education is the shortest film in the Small Axe anthology, which charts the lives of West Indians living in England in the later half of the 20th century, but its emotions register the strongest. This is because it centres on a child that is victim to the machinations of a racist education system that he does not understand. The film’s elucidation of the racist policies enacted in the British primary school system is specific, but its central contention that children who struggle could thrive if only they are given a bit of patience and care is universal to children everywhere. Thus, while it only offers a brief chapter in the life of one boy, it’s a challenging, moving, and, ultimately, hopeful conclusion to the entire Small Axe anthology project, summarizing its central tensions in its simple story of a boy who cannot read.

Education follows Kingsley Smith (Kenyah Sandy), a quiet 12-year-old who is enraptured by the idea of space travel, but has never learned to read, though he’s good at hiding that fact. When his school recommends he be transferred to a “special school,” his mother, Agnes (Sharlene Whyte), is too tired to put up much of a fight. She acquiesces as they all know Kingsley isn’t much of a student, and his father, Esmond (Daniel Francis), would just as rather he leave school and become a tradesman like himself. Esmond never learned to read and he gets along well enough in the world, so he doesn’t think his child needs anything different.

However, Agnes is eventually alerted to a movement within the community to address the racist policies of these so-called “special schools.” She’s given the pamphlet How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System by education advocate and economist Bernard Coard and slowly comes to realize that the “special schools'' are not schools at all, but dumping grounds for kids, mostly Black, that the British education system deems not worth educating.

Kingsley’s “special school” is a nightmarish vision of childhood confusion and chaos. It’s reminiscent of those days from childhood when a substitute teacher would take over for the day and completely fail to rein in the competing energies of the children in class. In my experience, these substitutes wanted to teach, but they had no control over children they weren’t familiar with. The problem with Kingsley’s teachers at the “special school” is that they have no interest in teaching at all. They use the time to work on their guitar skills or hang out in the teacher’s lounge. The kids are left to draw swears on the chalkboard, climb on the desks, fly paper airplanes, and, most disturbingly, bark like a dog (there are touches of the formative French films Zéro de conduite and The 400 Blows in the presentation). All of these children in the class are termed “educationally sub-normal” and so because they are “sub-normal,” the school treats them as little more than animals. In their mind, the label justifies the neglect.

In many ways, this arbitrary designation of being “educationally sub-normal” is a metaphor for all racist classifications in all societies: it is constructed as a justification for oppression and neglect at the hands of social institutions. The way that Education charts Agnes’s growing understanding of how racist institutions operate and how the Black working class are neglected gives the film its historically and sociologically fascinating narrative thrust. It sums up the operation of racist policy and the reactive political awakening so elegantly. But it’s the way Education observes Kingsley processing these facts that makes the film so special.

Like all boys, Kingsley is largely motivated by pride and shame. In an early scene after he cannot read a word when prompted, he tells the teacher that he knew the word, but has no answer to why he didn’t say it then, not wanting to reveal his obvious secret. He avoids his friends from his old school because he doesn’t want to have them condescend to him. He’d much rather get caught up in fantasies of space travel and becoming an astronaut like Neil Armstrong.

But eventually his mother and some well-meaning women from the West Indian community force him to reveal his illiteracy and take steps to address it. In the film’s most moving scene, Agnes, incensed by what she’s read in the pamphlet, forces Kingsley to sit down on the couch with her and read aloud from a book. Kingsley’s sister, Stephanie (Tamara Lawrence), is there to witness, and she’s taken aback by Agnes’ commands. Let the boy alone, she thinks, but Agnes is determined and she forces Kingsley to stutter his way through the first syllable before the boy bursts into tears, wordlessly confessing what all of them have known but none of them have admitted: that he cannot read because his teachers never taught him to. It’s a powerful moment of confession and love in the film, where the family grows closer through shared grief.

It all seems so hopeless and Kafkaesque, as the family is powerless to get Kingsley out of the terrible school or force the hand of the principal or educational superintendents. In a hilarious, bitterly ironic moment, Agnes is encouraged to write to the secretary of state for education and science, who is assumed to be sympathetic to their plight because she’s a woman; the secretary’s name: Margaret Thatcher. But the Smith family finds a way. They have a community and members of that community run a Saturday school, where they teach children neglected by the education system to learn to read and write. Furthermore, they teach them about their heritage and instill them with some pride about their culture and past.

In the end, Education shows what education often does look like, and also what it should look like. It’s a film that is both damning indictment and hopeful prescription. It’s rooted in the specific discrimination of the British school system and the policies that adversely affected the West Indian community through the 20th century, but it’s also universal to the experience of all children, who are all subject to a system that defines their lives without their input. Like all of the films in Small Axe, it captures the universal through the specific, helping us to understand ourselves better by understanding the stories of our neighbours.

9 out of 10

Small Axe: Education (2020, UK/US)

Directed by Steve McQueen; written by Steve McQueen and Alastair Siddons; starring Kenyah Sandy, Sharlene Whyte, Tamara Lawrence, Daniel Francis, Josette Simon, Naomi Ackie.

Related Posts