 The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
Diane Ravitch
Knopf, April 2003
Review by Common Good:
CG board member Diane Ravitch's new book, The Language Police, describes a world gone mad in search of fairness and avoiding bad feelings.
Her riveting expose describes the bizarre and often scary world of educational
censorship. The "sensible principle of removing racist and sexist language" has
turned into an "effort to delete whatever might annoy or offend the most agitated
imaginations." Merle Rubin of the Los Angeles Times asks:
What do dinosaurs, mountains, deserts, brave boys, shy girls, men fixing roofs,
women baking cookies, elderly people in wheelchairs, athletic African Americans,
God, heathens, witches, owls, birthday cake and religious fanatics all have in
common? Trick question?
No, all verboten.
Bias and sensitivity guidelines routinely used by educational publishers, test
development companies, the states, and scholarly and professional associations
"combine left-wing political correctness and right-wing fundamentalism, a strange
stew of discordant influences," explains Ravitch.
Ravitch relates how a story about forest animals living in a rotting tree trunk
had to be eliminated from a fourth grade reading test because comparing the tree
trunk to an apartment was "a negative, demeaning stereotype of apartments and
people who live in them." A true story about a heroic blind man who climbed Mount
McKinnley? No good for two reasons. First, "regional bias": stories about hiking
favor children who live in mountainous areas. But also it is "demeaning to applaud
a blind person for overcoming daunting obstacles, like climbing a steep, icy mountain
trail." Why? Because that implies that being blind is a handicap to be overcome.
That might hurt a blind person's feelings. Really.
As Ravitch pointed out recently, the classic Steinbeck novel, Of Mice and Men,
is out for two reasons: the word mice is too scary and might create a bad emotional
reaction in a test taking student, and the word men is generally taboo (along
with workmen, handyman, mankind, manpower, able-bodied seaman and other similar
slurs). Ravitch suggests "Of Small Furry Animals and People" as a possible non
offensive title for Steinbeck's classic.
The Language Police also contains an important and comprehensive review of history
text books, many of which laud every society but our own as advanced and civilized.
The thirty-page Glossary of Banned Words, Usages and Stereotypes (including citations
to the various guidelines) would be side-splittingly funny if it were not so sad
and scary. The b's alone contain thirty-six entries including: backward (ethnocentric
- must be replaced); backwoodsman (sexist - must be replaced with pioneer); blind
(offensive - replace with people who are blind); bookworm (offensive - replace
with intellectuall) and many other highly offensive terms.
Most troubling is the resulting dumbing down of education. Ravitch explains:
this activism has made the textbooks dull. Studies showed that they also had
a simpler vocabulary, that they had been dumbed down at the same time they were
being 'purified.' With everything that might offend anyone removed, the textbooks
lacked the capacity to inspire, sadden, or intrigue their readers. Such are the
wages of censorship.
We highly recommend this eminently readable and scholarly history of an important
subject.
* * *
Click here to read Michiko Kakutani's review in the New York Times.
Click here to read Jonathan Yardley's review in the Washington Post.
Book Description:
Before Anton Chekhov and Mark Twain can be used in school readers and exams,
they must be vetted by a bias and sensitivity committee. An anthology used in
Tennessee schools changed "By God!" to "By gum!" and "My God!" to "You don't mean
it." The New York State Education Department omitted mentioning Jews in an Isaac
Bashevis Singer story about prewar Poland, or blacks in Annie Dillard's memoir
of growing up in a racially mixed town. California rejected a reading book because
The Little Engine That Could was male.
Diane Ravitch maintains that America's students are compelled to read insipid
texts that have been censored and bowdlerized, issued by publishers who willingly
cut controversial material from their books--a case of the bland leading the bland.
The Language Police is the first full-scale exposé of this cultural and educational scandal, written
by a leading historian. It documents the existence of an elaborate and well-established
protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and implemented by test makers
and textbook publishers, states, and the federal government. School boards and
bias and sensitivity committees review, abridge, and modify texts to delete potentially
offensive words, topics, and imagery. Publishers practice self-censorship to sell
books in big states.
To what exactly do the censors object? A typical publisher's guideline advises
that
• Women cannot be depicted as caregivers or doing household chores.
• Men cannot be lawyers or doctors or plumbers. They must be nurturing helpmates.
• Old people cannot be feeble or dependent; they must jog or repair the roof.
• A story that is set in the mountains discriminates against students from flatlands.
• Children cannot be shown as disobedient or in conflict with adults.
• Cake cannot appear in a story because it is not nutritious.
The result of these revisions are--no surprise!--boring, inane texts about a
cotton-candy world bearing no resemblance to what children can access with the
click of a remote control or a computer mouse. Sadly, data show that these efforts
to sanitize language do not advance learning or bolster test scores, the very
reason given for banning allegedly insensitive words and topics.
Ravitch offers a powerful political and economic analysis of the causes of censorship.
She has practical and sensible solutions for ending it, which will improve the
quality of books for students as well as liberating publishers, state boards of
education, and schools from the grip of pressure groups.
Passionate and polemical, The Language Police is a book for every educator, concerned parent, and engaged citizen.
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