Braithwaite.E.R. To Sir With Love. First published in Great Britain.1959. Coronet Paperback.1988.

Over this week, I made my annual pilgrimage through the pages of this book. It is a classic for any educator, because it is a teacher education manual in print and one can consider it as a tool of reference, if one is beset by difficult classes.

What an amazing story, entirely credible, because haven’t we all had some teacher like this Braithwaite who influenced us at school and helped us grow with dignity and self esteem?

The struggle of this black teacher in a school set in the  tough East End neighbourhood is every teacher’s struggle. These students are systemic of learners who fight against odds at deprived homes and loveless existences to find their own paths in a society that mostly does not care.

The story is well knit – the teachers, each an entity with personal prejudices and ideas, Mr.Fabian, the headmaster, the man who dreams and envisions a great educating system for his wards, Ricardo Braithwaite, a black war veteran and now a teacher by sad turn of events, Gillian, who stands for a miniscule white community beginning to respect the balcks, the students who tackle their poverty and the ugliness of their lives with the dignity that Braithwaite has given them, the Thomases who doubt the efficacy of a system that educates without the cane... ah, each of these combines with the other to form a beautiful collage.

There is enough drama,  passion,  romance, trust, anger, mistrust, to make its pages interesting. What caught my interest was that it was on one side, the story of a teacher finding acceptance and solidarity with a tough batch of East End students and on the other, it was the story of a man who wanted to be accepted as a human being, on his own merit, undeterred by the colour of his skin. Gillian’s love for him and the children’s unreserved acceptance of him redeem this man and help him win his battle of colour.

I may go back to this story, may be next year, but I’d like it to be on the bookshelf of my grandchildren, for whom the Civil Wars and Apartheid Policies may be things of a distant past and I’d like them to remember that people went through such struggles before the  people could enjoy the liberty that they are enjoying now.