Drawing on fields including educational sociolinguistics, critical language awareness, and raciolinguistics, this book offers compelling insights into how standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies shape contemporary education policy in schools across England. Through critical analysis of a wide range of policy mechanisms rooted in British colonial logics, including national curricula frameworks, professional standards for teachers, and official reports concerning language and curricula reform, Cushing effectively demonstrates how historical formations of language and race continue to play a key role in the reproduction of social inequality in schools across England today. The book provides a very detailed historical overview of the sociopolitical structures, institutions, and state-level mechanisms which craft a narrative of linguistic deprivation around minoritized speakers. Cushing shows how such a narrative serves only the interests of the social elite, obscuring institutional structures of social hierarchies and locating perceived ‘problems’ within the speech of poor, minoritized children.
A major strength of Cushing's book, aside from the clarity with which he discusses the theoretical foundations of his genealogical approach, is his discussion of word gap ideologies and concepts such as ‘word jails’. The latter have become so routine in schools across England today that they have become accepted practice, without teachers questioning their ideological underpinnings. Cushing details how lists of ‘banned words’, including fillers such as erm and other words such as bare were displayed on classroom walls in the London schools which he observed. Word gap ideologies were also employed under the guise that they provide minoritized children with more vocabulary, in order to help them to escape ‘word poverty’. As Cushing demonstrates, these practices attempt to provide a linguistic solution to what is essentially a sociopolitical problem. In a culture of performativity, Cushing details how teachers often find themselves caught up in, as well as being subjected to, highly politicised listening. The importance of reframing the ‘problem’ as lying not in the speech of minoritized children, nor the teacher, but instead in the listening practices of the white listening subject forms one of the focuses of the book. It encourages the reader to engage in self-reflexivity, questioning their own taken-for-granted assumptions and thinking about how they may be complicit in the reproduction of white linguistic supremacy.
In various places within the book, Cushing addresses the intersection between social class and race, arguing, for example, that ‘race, as well as class [foster]… social hierarchies built on exclusion and segregation’ and explicitly rejects ‘‘race’ and ‘class’ as distinct dichotomies’ (15). However, it is worth nothing that raciolinguistics as a concept was born in the US following a long history of racial segregation. By more explicitly drawing upon the decades of work which details the British working-class experience in the education system, Cushing could perhaps have focused more on the specific intersections of race and class in the UK context. Nonetheless, the sheer scope of this book and the new vision of language education it proposes, makes this book an essential text for both educational practitioners and policymakers alike.
