ABSTRACT
What was the pathology report on the British urban classroom as 1980 approached? It was a portrait in the cities and large towns of schools in tumult. Indeed, in the conurbations of other advanced countries, such as the US, Australia, and Canada the crisis in the urban classroom was causing widespread alarm.1 Urban education in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s was devastated by demographic landslide and ravaged by epidemic maladjustment. Some 21 per cent of boys and 16 per cent of girls in the inner city playground exhibited aggressive and abnormal behaviour. Juvenile crimes of violence multiplied seventeen times in the twenty-five years before 1977. Schoolchildren in London and other major cities were often a year behind the national average in reading attainment at eleven years.2 Not only were playgrounds hazardously menaced by disturbed children, the school curriculum was visibly distorted. Yet such endemic maladjustment among urban children ruled out special educational treatment as too expensive. The cry rang out, disguised as enlightened policy; ‘contain your problem children’ in the ordinary school. Perhaps, as the teaching profession uneasily claimed, schools merely reflected the deterioration and quality of urban life. But beyond doubt, in London, Glasgow and many urban authorities the schools system, especially in new comprehensives or multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, was on the edge of total collapse.3
