Slum School

The decision to teach, the teacher admits with irony, "was forced on me by the very urgent need to eat." For two embittering years after World War II, Edward Ricardo Braithwaite, sometime R.A.F. fighter pilot, searched for a job. He was a well-qualified physicist with degrees from New York University and graduate experience at Cambridge. But he was also a British Guiana-born Negro, and the London engineering firms to which he applied told him politely that there must have been some mistake: no jobs were available. Then Braithwaite heard that London's schools were desperately short of teachers. The young physicist got his job--as an instructor in Greenslade secondary school, a state-financed establishment for troublemaking slum children from London's East End.

The 15-year-olds in Braithwaite's class, most of them white, were hard and gutter-wise: girls who jiggled provocatively in too-tight sweaters, boys who slouched about in stovepipe jeans. Braithwaite's story of eventual victory over their ignorance--and their casually vicious race bigotry--is warmly told in To Sir, with Love (The Bodley Head; 13s. 6d.). By last week his publishers had printed 10,000 copies, and ex-Teacher Braithwaite (he is now a children's officer for the London social welfare department) was a.moderate literary sensation.

Ladles, Gentlemen & Scholars. Braithwaite had his own racial bitterness to overcome on that first day as he sat listening to Headmaster Alexander Florian talk of Greenslade's children. The school allowed no punishment of a child. Most of them were from impoverished homes, said the headmaster, and "a child who has slept all night in a stuffy, overcrowded room, and then breakfasts on a cup of weak tea and a piece of bread, can hardly be expected to show a sharp, sustained interest in the abstractions of arithmetic and the unrelated niceties of correct spelling." Recalls Braithwaite: "My own experiences . . . invaded my thoughts, reminding me that these children were white, and as far as I was concerned, that fact alone made the only difference between the haves and the have-nots."

For weeks Braithwaite's students met him with indifference or open hostility. They learned little, muttered about the "bleeding cheek" of the "black bastard" when he corrected them. Couples necked openly in the halls, sullenly waited as he passed to begin again.

Finally Braithwaite lost his temper, tongue-lashed his laggards. Beginning immediately, he told them, they were to act like ladies, gentlemen--and scholars. They sat amazed as he gave his startling ultimatum: girls were to be addressed as Miss, boys were to be referred to by their surnames. He himself, he announced, would answer only to Sir or Mr. Braithwaite. When one boy objected that he knew the girls too well for formality, Braithwaite scored a tactical victory. "Is there any young lady present whom you consider unworthy of your courtesies?" he asked. The girls glared at the rebel in outrage; he backed down.

The Teacher's Quality. Gradually, Braithwaite and his class learned mutual respect. The students' "sir"' became less forced, and the teacher's prejudices began to break down as he found a few quick, honest minds among the slum children. Progress was not smooth: Braithwaite was forced to outslug the class troublemaker, a hulking amateur boxer, and habitual bigotry cut through newly learned tolerance when the class refused to take flowers to the house of a Negro boy whose white mother had died. (Tolerance ultimately won, and the entire class showed up for the funeral.)

What the book suggests is that the quality of the teacher is far more important than the strictness, or permissiveness of the school. A system that ignores the worst kind of profanity in the classroom, and that encourages children to write corrosively candid weekly reports on their teachers, does not sound promising. But for Born Teacher Braithwaite it worked very well. When the tough-kid class graduated, its gift to Braithwaite was inscribed: "To Sir, with Love."

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