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Censorship by Pressure Groups
Reprinted from the January-February, 2003 BASIS Book Review
The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch (2003) Alfred A. Knopf, hardback, 255 pages. $24.00.
It’s always a pleasure seeing the smug and self-righteous exposed in the daylight of public opinion. In this case, the smug, politically correct folks, usually from the left, and the self-righteous social conservatives (to use the politically correct term for religious fundamentalists) seem to have the same agenda: The control of what our children learn from textbooks. What goes out the window is historical accuracy and cultural reality, not to mention any semblance of what literature means. Science especially suffers. Evolution, the backbone of modern biology, cannot be mentioned in some textbooks since it might offend certain religious pressure groups. For fear of upsetting leftish visions, a careful balance of ethnic minorities must be maintained making it difficult, if not impossible, to present history accurately.
Textbook publishers are eager to please. All of the major American publishers of schoolbooks are divisions of large corporations. Each year they consolidate and merge giving even less choice. Their primary concern is the bottom line. Small publishers cannot afford the multi-million dollar development costs. Any pressure group, left or right, is going to be listened to. After all, almost any Miss Grundy can stop a multi-national in its tracks with a well-placed letter to a state board of education.
So guidelines are developed, filtering committees are put in place, and everything becomes bland and muddled from the cumulative affects of removing anything that smacks of controversy. No wonder the philo-babble of films like “The Matrix Reloaded” holds so much appeal. Modern students are rarely exposed to real philosophy or the great political debates of this generation or those of our forebears.
The first 170 pages of Ravitch's book consist of text in which she outlines how our textbooks have become bland, and worse, inaccurate. Bill Bennetta, a BAS advisor and head of The Textbook League, is acknowledged as one of her key sources. Having run the TTL web site for several years, and having read many of its textbook reviews and articles, I find it easy to substantiate what she says about textbooks. But her account of how this situation developed, especially in the area of testing and despite the fact that for several years, I’ve been “in the know,” is largely new to me. Still, that history is not surprising. It is the classic tale of how bureaucracies form when the public is looking the other way. Pressure groups from all over the political spectrum, allowed to operate in the dark, can indeed become entrenched and powerful, especially if it is a corporation, with its eye more on profit than product, that is being monitored. Science, particularly the branches which appear to counter religious notions, like biology and geology, history and literature are reconfigured to partisan political, religious and cultural biases. Education suffers. Critical thinking disappears. Kids lose out since indoctrination comes before any thought of education.
Making the book even more powerful is her 30-page “...Sampler of Classic Literature for Home and School,” (Appendix II) which Ravitch compiled with educator Rodney Atkinson. So many authors criticize without offering alternatives, but here, for literature at least, she doesn’t make that blunder. This appendix is a good resource for both teacher and parent. I think it an essential section in the book. Besides, I delight in her selections. I hope she posts this on the book’s web site as a public service: www.languagepolice.com.
The Alabama State Board of Education, in 1995, created an insert to be pasted in each of the biology textbooks used in that state. It said that evolution was only a “theory” and implied that this made it less worthy than a “fact.” Now it can be inserted seamlessly with a computer. A full page portrait of Darwin will adorn the New York version in the same space of the biology textbook. Among the urban elite in the Bay Area of San Francisco, all the “dead white men” at the birth of the Constitution can be safely ignored and it can be taught that we got most of our political ideas from Native American forms of government. Never mind the influence of European philosophers such as Hume and Locke, or the influence of Spinoza in making us the first modern secular state. In areas of the nation where gun ownership is considered sacrosanct, the part of the Second Amendment to the Constitution that states, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state...” can be safely removed to avoid offending our friends in the National Rifle Association. After all, the headquarters building of the NRA in Washington D.C. only has, on its facade, the second part of the Second Amendment, “...the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Every looney-tune notion, left or right, can easily be accommodated. Textbook reviews will require zip codes next to the title so the reader knows which version of a textbook is being talked about.
The fun is just beginning.
A Small Sample of Banned Words, Usages, Stereotypes, and Topics pulled from Appendix I of “The Language Police,” pages 171-202
Anchorman (banned as sexist, replace with “anchor person” or “newscaster”), p. 171 Among the images to Avoid are: Women who are not team players; Men or boys in active problem-solving roles; People of color who abandon their own culture or language to achieve success; American Indians as primitive or warlike; Asian Americans as working in a laundry or as musical prodigies or class valedictorians; Latinos who are lazy or passive; Mexicans grinding corn or riding donkeys; Jews always wearing business suits, glasses, and carrying briefcases; People with disabilities as saintly like Tiny Tim, or as a burden to others; Fat social misfits (that leaves any reference to me out of textbooks -Y.B.); Old ladies with twenty cats; and Irish policemen, pages 184-194 Among the topics to avoid are: Conflict with authority (parents, teachers, law); Crime; Dialect (especially black dialect); evolution presented as fact rather than scientific theory; Guns and shooting; Lying or duplicity of any kind; Physical violence; References to Humanism that might give it the status of religion; Religion; Unpunished transgressions; or Winter holidays (probably because of the pagan origins of many of them -Y.B.), pages 194-195
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I’ve been warned that Diane Ravitch, the author, is a somewhat of a conservative. She has her own agenda, which is to decentralize education and leave more control in the hands of local school boards, and less in the hands of regional, state and national authorities. In addition, she supports school vouchers. The fear, understandably, is that proper science education, especially biology, could go out the window in many school districts. Indeed, the book mentions but doesn’t spend too much time with evolution, which is likely to be the area most negatively affected by decentralization and vouchers. Furthermore, she is clearly more interested in history and literature, and the havoc that political correctness plays on both. In the interest of full disclosure, I declare myself, without apology, to be a bit of an old-fashioned liberal and have always been a supporter of public education. I oppose school vouchers, for instance, not only because of their negative affect on science education (only strong national standards can insure good science education), but because I fear that American schools will become parochialized if vouchers become widespread. I see the melting pot as an ideal, even if not completely achievable, and am convinced that public schools help give us the common purpose that is essential to a modern industrial democracy like ours. I embrace, warts and all, the civic virtue of our secular liberal democracy and firmly believe that universal public education under government auspices is an important part of that equation.
But whatever the public policy overview, Ravitch’s or mine, we both want textbooks to be accurate in their depiction of science and history. And we don’t want to see the bowdlerization of literature. We want kids to have full access to Shakespeare and Darwin. The world can be portrayed realistically without giving offense. If the student asks why no minorities were present in Independence Hall in 1776, the teacher can seize the opportunity to answer the question by talking about the history of racial attitudes and the roles forced on minorities at various times in our history. We must not forget, with all the debate, that a live, intelligent human being is teaching and can be trusted to educate the young. Textbooks are meant to set standards, provide the basic information, and not to replace or muffle the teacher. If anything, the child will have a better understanding of how minorities were dealt with. For these reasons, Ravitch is mostly on the side of the angels and I applaud her success in making the problem public.
A 30-page glossary of “...Banned Words, Usages, Stereotypes and Topics” follows. This is where most national reviewers of the book got their sensational quotes. Some of it is outrageous, such as not allowing mention of “crime, dialect, divorce, drinking and drugs” in textbooks. Such things simply don’t exist in the sanitized world of today’s textbooks. Some proscriptions are simply absurd: “Jews as diamond cutters, jewelers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, classical musicians, tailors and shopkeepers” are considered stereotypical images to be avoided. Uh! Almost every Jew I know, including many of my relatives, are members of these perfectly honorable professions (except that I happen to know a Jewish dairy farmer in Marin County, California – also perfectly honorable). Bill Bennetta pointed out to me that some other rules require outright inaccuracy. For example, the language police forbid the use of the terms "jungle" and "lumberjack," and they declare that schoolbook-writers must replace those words with "rain forest" and "woodcutter." In the real world, a jungle and a rain forest are two different things, and "woodcutter" is not, by any means, synonymous with "lumberjack." I once called a cabinet maker a “carpenter” and nearly got my head handed to me. Words and labels do mean something. If I prefer the terms “police officer” and “firefighter” instead of the usual alternatives, it is because they are truly descriptive of the current jobs, and roll off the tongue easily, not because they are politically acceptable. I have no problem with waitress or waiter. The politically correct “server” would only confuse me. A “server” is the computer that holds shared programs and data on a network.
I strongly recommend the book, but warn that what she discusses is only the beginnings of a coming storm. Soon, if it hasn’t already started to happen, someone will discover that the “publishing on demand” technology now emerging will allow publishers to package books to local taste. With this technology, computers can pull desired text from electronic storage, put it together, renumber pages, print and bind books on order in exactly the right numbers to fill an order. It saves paper, warehouse space, and guessing. Northern textbooks will talk of the “Civil War” and the Southern version of the same book will talk about the “War Between the States.” It’s duck soup to do something like that with a computer. Texas textbooks may teach biology without mentioning evolution (I’m still figuring out how that is possible) while the California equivalent (hopefully) will satisfy any mainstream biologist. Literary excerpts will come in many flavors, both in what they choose and how they are bowdlerized. Perhaps Samuel Clemens will write a humorous essay about bowdlerization from his desk in Purgatory.