Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England’s Schools

‘Never just about language’ is a recurring theme that is powerfully embossed into this book. Cushing vividly plunges into the linkages of how the curation of standardised English functions as a mechanism of power and control to shame those who exist differently whether it is aurally, physically, or economically. He explores how such differences are violently policed under England’s education system. The repetition of ‘Never just about language’ is a bold, purposeful, and truthful assertion that forcefully challenges the too common and uncritical platitudes of ahistoricism, apoliticism, and neutrality that have come to be naturalised with(in) language learning, teaching, and policies within the neoliberal educational landscape in England, but also globally. ‘Never just about language’, as Cushing pens, also illuminates the violent and racist colonial continuities of standardised English language: ‘a sonic coding of white supremacy’ (12), grounded on the deliberate engineering of ideas to compartmentalise and hierarchise certain bodies and languages in the modern vista.

Maneuvering through text, it becomes apparent that some of the assertions Cushing dispenses will certainly be met with resistance and bitterly denounced. This is so because his rigorous evidence-based claims are legitimate and unsettle the safeguarding of the sentinels of power. In Chapter 4, an impressively researched deployment into the education policies in England post-2010, focusing on standards-based reforms, Cushing disentangles, for instance, how ‘decades of c/Conservative discourse have propagated the ideology that respect for standardised English, as a codeword for “White British values”, means a veneration for discipline and broader standards – and a disrespect [of standardised English] means the opposite’ (88). This provocation, specific not only to the conservative educational rhetoric but spanning most of England’s political panorama, as Cushing rightfully spotlights, illustrates how and why such repressive ideologies become implanted and seep into the micro-levels where it demonises, punishes, and hurt those who speak differently. A more lucid exemplification is how Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) arguably operates as arbitrator of whiteness that diminishes alternative and atypical forms of the English language and disciplines its speakers. The contemporary inspectorate of England’s school is not an objective institution, as it is often blindly portrayed. The reference to the ‘leaked’ ‘confidential training documents’ (111) in which school inspectors are groomed to identify non-standardised English reminds us of the colonial speech policing that occurred cruelly in lands England colonised.

As a Caribbean national, who has been penalised for speaking my Trinidadian English and Trinidadian English Creole within the classroom, and who, as an educator uncritically exerted comparable punitive measures onto my students in the past for swaying from ‘standard English’, this book conjures up a spectrum of emotions for those who have had their linguistic competence questioned and resultingly pondered their own language, educational ability, and existence. Similarity and solidarity are shared when we are briefly exposed to the brutality that enshrouds those who step out of the constructed boundary of white standardised English. For example, the experiences of Jamilah, a Black British in-service teacher with Somali heritage, are emblematic of such territorialisation in which her use of the English language is perceived as ‘ugly and threatening’ (148). The pain and judgement she endures linger.

There is great discomfort Cushing’s offerings, and this is precisely the point of the book. It is meant to deliberately stir reactions regardless of the ontological perspective of the reader. The introduction of concepts such sonic surveillance and panlinguistic surveillance, while not new per se, as Cushing admits, builds upon the works of other critically oriented scholars. These ideas take on the responsibility to equip educators and students with vocabulary to articulate the hostility embedded in our education systems, but also to recognise and undermine them. Specifically, the term panlinguistic surveillance eloquently elucidates the intermingling of language and the body, which are ‘part of the same processes of stigmatisation and racialisation – used to justify support for colonialism and the structures of white supremacy which emerged from this’ (47).

As oppressive as education systems and language ideologies are, we are reminded that resistance has always been a hallmark of many educators in England, who have refused to succumb, and continue to reject raciolinguistic ideologies, and other practices that deny the panlinguistic existence of others. Cushing justly urges for the creation and recognition of ‘alternative worlds’ and suggests strategies for their enactment, with aspirations enlisted in the decolonial project and Black feminist thought. While we must proceed courageously, such counsel could have been enhanced by a more focused expansion on the hurdles presented by unrelenting neoliberalism in realising such transformations.

Ultimately, Cushing’s book is an accessible, necessary, and significant contribution to fields of education, applied linguistics and social justice. While primacy was placed on England’s schools, it serves as an indispensable resource beyond British borders, particularly for those located in the realms of TESOL, language planning and policy and sociolinguistics. The arguments Cushing elicits are a warning and reminder that language ideologies migrate and shift temporally and geographically and invoke violence even in the most unassuming of ways. Nearing the end of the penultimate chapter of the book, Anthony, a secondary school teacher in London, discloses that during his degree in English language and literature in England ‘he did not recall a single lecture or seminar where discussions on race and language had taken place’ (236/7). Anthony’s revelation is by no means unsurprising, which makes Cushing’s book an essential starter that should be available in every university in England.