SMALL AXE: EDUCATION Review
In its final entry, SMALL AXE flies once more. Throughout a series that focused on sturdy activists, star-crossed lovers, idealistic cops, and a redeemed convict, Steve McQueen’s rousing experiment comes to a powerful conclusion with a look at the children of London’s West Indian community who find themselves caught up in a rigged game they don’t even know they’re playing.
Kingsley Smith (Kenyah Sandy) is the 12-year-old protagonist of this story, or rather, the catalyst to a family discovering the malevolent workings of their school system. With a youthful obsession over astronauts and space, Kingsley seemingly appears to be like any other 12-year-old student at his school; that is, until he causes a “disruption” in class one day when he struggles to read aloud with his peers, resulting in him being sent to the headmaster’s office who then gets in contact with Kingsley’s working mother, Agnes (Sharlene Whyte). It is there where EDUCATION reveals its injustice at play as the headmaster recommends that Kingsley be sent to a school made for students with “special needs” seeing as how the young boy seems to have a reading disability of sorts. At first, despite Kinglsey’s complaints, Agnes tentatively complies with this request in the hopes that her son can find the help he needs, but as we follow Kingsley on his first few days at his new school, he and the audience begin to realize that the school is less an area of learning and more of a place to put away the education system’s rejects.
In its depiction of a child’s education literally being thrown aside, EDUCATION realizes its anger quietly and tragically as Kingsley’s family composed of his mother, his working father (Daniel Francis), and older sister (Tamara Lawrence) come to the realization that they’ve been duped into negating Kingsley’s learning. These characters, while fictional, once again bring stirring humanity to McQueen’s depiction of a series of incidents in the 1970’s that sent hundreds of predominately Black students to deplorable centers like the one Kingsley finds himself in, all in the name of supposed rehabilitation. As displayed in Mr. Sandy’s impressive central performance, which perfectly captures the strained feelings of a child realizing not only his own flaws but that of a much larger system, “education” initiatives like these didn’t just wreck the confidence of the children they supposedly aimed to help, but the entire family system. While objectively stern and single minded at times, Kingsley’s parents no doubt love their son and like any parents who love their children, hearing that their child is less than “normal” brings up questions and concerns that turn criticism away from the system set out to destroy them and towards themselves and one another. This tragic conflict plays out between Kingsley’s mom, who assuredly begins to fight for her son’s chance at a fair education, and his father, a hard working man who teeters between pity and hard-headedness as he feels his son would be better off working in a trade rather than pursuing an education in a system that may have rigged his own life. As the Smith family threatens to implode or collapse, a light of hope appears in a group of women (Naomi Ackie and Josette Simon, respectively) determined to bring to light the education system’s misdeeds and offer a sort of community school that would bring the vital education that kids like Kingsley need.
It’s a lot of events to put into roughly one hour of runtime, and with the use of a mostly fictional group of characters not everyone expands beyond their archetypes, but even so, McQueen somehow manages to depict a fulfilling journey of one child’s battle against a rigged system in sufficient manner. Much like ALEX WHEATLE and LOVERS ROCK, this final entry moves at a more lowkey energy despite its trying circumstances, once again allowing viewers to appreciate the finer details of EDUCATION’s sets and costume design, bringing out the cluttered warmth of Kingsley’s home in contrast to the cluttered decay and stagnation of his new “school”. As per usual, Shabier Kirchner’s penchant for utilizing film in partnership with McQueen’s keen sense of emotional framing where internal feelings are allowed to flow free authentically brings to life EDUCATION’s world.
In a series dedicated to depicting the seemingly never-ending plight of a community and its assailants, EDUCATION as its final note, finds power in quietly powerful yet tender ending that repeats the series’ emphasis on finding strength in your surrounding community. As Kingsley and his family find some sense of progress in not only his ability to read but to his, and other similar children’s, opportunity to find education, Steve McQueen’s series connects to the proverb that inspired its title. No matter how large the “tree” of racial inequity may stand among a people or community, even the smallest of “axes”, whether that be the likes of ‘The Mangrove Nine”, Leroy Logan, Alex Wheatle, the party goers and lovers of LOVERS ROCK, or even children like Kingsley, can provide the swings that reveal a new and better world.
4/5
