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From International Socialism (1st series), No.29, Summer 1967, p.38.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Spring Grove
Trevor Burgin and Patricia Edson
Oxford, for Institute of Race Relations, 21s
An intelligent and humane study, by its headmaster and an assistant teacher, of how one school in Huddersfield has succeeded in integrating non-English-speaking immigrant children into the educational life of the community. Burgin is clearly a man prepared to be flexible in his approach to classroom situations, and to bring sympathy and understanding to the problems confronting the immigrant children in their alien environment and the indigenous teachers facing a totally unfamiliar educational challenge. One salutes the dedication and enterprise of the young teacher who hitch-hiked to India to familiarise himself with the villages from which many of Huddersfield’s Sikhs have come.
The experimental teaching of immigrant children at Spring Grove School is an undoubted stimulus to the educational experience of the indigenous children, who have obviously benefited from being part of a multi-racial community. Evidence is provided that the English children have not been held back academically; Burgin provides more than adequate factual rebuttal of the opinion expressed by Peter Griffiths (quoted in Paul Foot’s Immigration and Race in British Politics) that English children are held back by their non-English-speaking classmates. The seeds of successful total integration are sown in the schools. More Spring Groves, and the way to total integration would be eased.
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Last updated on 6 May 2010