STANDARDS, STIGMA, SURVEILLANCE: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England’s Schools 
by Ian Cushing, Palgrave Macmillan, £35.99

IN THE Kenyan David Mulwa’s compelling 1979 novel of anti-colonial reality and resistance, Master and Servant, the young protagonist Kituku beholds for the first time the large sign over the door of his classroom: “In this school you must speak English. Avoid vernacular, it makes you stupid.”
    
As I read Ian Cushing’s account of raciolinguistic ideologies and England’s schools, entitled Standards, Stigma, Surveillance, and imbibed his descriptions of nonstandard codes of pupils’ languages being forbidden, pathologised and marked out as delinquency — with notices on England’s schools’ corridors listing “banned words and phrases” — my mind went back to Mulwa’s gripping narrative. 
    
Suddenly it had a sharp relevance to now-times English education, so much of which is in the grip of privatised moulds of the Labour-instigated academy system.

Cushing’s intention is to show that in mainstream English schools a standardised English speech is the vehicle of raciolinguistic oppression at the expense of all other registers, be they first languages, dialects or creole vernaculars. It is contrived by the state to humiliate and destroy all other registers of language and remake them in the image of a colonial aggressor. 

It’s a powerful argument, lucidly and persuasively made in his profoundly unsettling and intricately researched book.