A worthy aim, but these pupils were guinea pigs
‘This is the most fun racist game I’ve ever played!” said one of the children in The School That Tried to End Racism (Channel 4), as his class of 11-year-olds embarked on their TV experiment. The goal was to expose unconscious bias among a group of Year 7 pupils who, on the face of it, had no racial prejudice. At the beginning, they asserted that race doesn’t matter, and it’s who you are inside that counts – all things we teach young children.
But there is a school of thought that colour-blindness, however wellintentioned, is a form of racism. “By doing that, you’re also erasing my experiences as a woman of colour, my history, the fact that I experience racism,” said Dr Nicola Rollock, one of the academics involved in the show. And while we may not consider ourselves to be racist, she explained, our judgments can suggest otherwise.
The experiment began with the children taking Harvard’s unconscious bias test (the show said this was widely accepted as an accurate benchmark, but its validity has been questioned). To their surprise, 18 out of 24 of them showed bias towards white faces. Then they were segregated into “affinity groups” – one white, one non-white.
This presented difficulties for Farrah, who had a white mother and Sri Lankan father. The black kids spoke easily about their experiences. By contrast, the white group sat in awkward near-silence.
The experiment prompted the children to have honest conversations with each other about race, and it opened the white children’s eyes to the concept of privilege. These were undeniably good things. It is important to challenge racial bias at this age, the programme said, in an attempt to stop children taking that into adulthood. Hard to disagree.
What left me uncomfortable was not that children were involved in such an experiment, but that it was served up for our entertainment. Channel 4 has a dubious history here: I’m thinking of The Great British School Swap and the long-gone but not forgotten Make Bradford British, exploitative rubbish designed to make us point and laugh.
This show was an improvement but still felt voyeuristic, as the two academics monitored events on a screen. “Aww, she’s really emotionally invested,” they said as they watched Farrah crying. The children were articulate and engaged, yes, but they were still only 11 years old and they had been signed up for this without full knowledge of what it would entail.
To the final of Britain’s Smuggest Parent – sorry, Britain’s Best Parent? (Channel 4) – which was a contest in which couples battled it out to prove that their particular brand of child-rearing was the one we should all be following. A concept to make you wince, made watchable by fond imagining that these children will one day grow up to be the exact opposite of what their parents intended.
Where to start? With Becky and Ben, “creative home educators” who believe children need to stick it to the man by setting their own bedtime and not going to school. “We we don’t have to be a slave to momentary times throughout a day,” said Ben. Someone pointed out that this method isn’t transferable to households in which parents go out to work every morning.
Nicky and David were at the other end of the scale, disciplinarians of the old school who advocated smacking and eating what you’re given. Ben wailed that one of David’s threatened punishments – confiscating a child’s phone – wouldn’t be “motivating her towards positivity”. “It’s motivating her not to do it again,” said David.
Rin and Robin parented with “eastern philosophy”, which meant that their kids had to do martial arts. Robin gave off a competitive dad energy as he asserted that his methods produce “righteous, intellectually formidable” children. Indeed, who could argue with his son’s sage words when asked if winning was important, after seeing Robin celebrate victory in a canoeing race with a bunch of kids: “If it’s a canoeing race, it doesn’t really matter. But if it’s war it means a lot.”
Jen and Tom were back to basics, advocating fresh air and splashing about in puddles. They all acted as if they’d discovered a revolutionary mode of parenting, when it mostly amounted to going outside, following rules and behaving nicely at the table.
Anita Rani ably marshalled the couples’ passive-aggressive discussions. “That’s gaslighting,” Becky told Nicky, before gaslighting her). In the end the studio audience voted for Rin and Robin. “I don’t know what to say,” said Rin, speaking for most of us.