Read No Evil: A Textbook Case of Censorship

'The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn' by Diane Ravitch

THE LANGUAGE POLICE
How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
By Diane Ravitch
Knopf. 255 pp. $24

It's difficult to exaggerate the importance of this book. Whether "The Language Police" will turn out to be one of those rare books that actually influence the way we live -- Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" -- remains to be seen, but surely one must pray that it does. Meticulously researched and forcefully argued, it makes appallingly plain that the textbooks American schoolchildren read and the tests that measure their academic progress have been corrupted by a bizarre de facto alliance of the far left and the far right.

Diane Ravitch got the first hint of this several years ago when she "stumbled upon an elaborate, well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and broadly implemented by textbook publishers, testing agencies, professional associations, states, and the federal government." Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998 to a board investigating the possibilities and pitfalls of voluntary national testing, Ravitch soon learned "that it was standard operating procedure in the educational testing industry to submit all passages and test questions to a bias and sensitivity review," and that this was not at all what she had expected it to be.

Ravitch had assumed that any such review would implement "the sensible principle of removing racist and sexist language" from the tests, but in fact that had long since been accomplished. Now, she learned to her horror, "bias" has metamorphosed into "anything in a test item that might cause any student to be distracted or upset." Some of the examples she came across can only be described as absurd: A story about peanuts was eliminated from one test, because "the reviewers apparently assumed that a fourth-grade student who was allergic to peanuts might get distracted if he or she encountered a test question that did not acknowledge the dangers of peanuts," and an "inspiring" story about a blind mountain climber was rejected because, "in the new meaning of bias, it is considered biased to acknowledge that lack of sight is a disability."

The discovery that the most important tests at the elementary and high school levels had degenerated into feel-good exercises in boosting self-esteem by "denying reality" led Ravitch from the tests to the texts, where she learned that activists on the left and the right are "agreed on one point: Children's minds would be shaped, perhaps forever, by the content and images in their textbooks." Preposterous though this notion is, it has achieved the status of gospel among those who write bias and sensitivity guidelines.

Textbook publishers' thirst for the vast amounts of money to be earned when their publications are adopted by California, Texas and a few other disproportionately influential states obviously is far greater than their interest in educating schoolchildren, so they have merrily capitulated to the pressure groups. They give the right-wingers control of topics and content -- nothing about abortion, evolution, divorce, crime -- and the left-wingers control of language, i.e., the weasel words of political correctness. Ravitch writes: "The pressure groups of left and right have important points of convergence. Both right-wingers and left-wingers demand that publishers shield children from words and ideas that contain what they deem the 'wrong' models for living. Both assume that by limiting what children read, they can change society to reflect their worldview."

So much for the old truism that no maiden was ever ravished by a book. The ideologues of right and left have, apparently, bottomless faith in the power of the written word to shape not just the minds of the young but to determine the course of their lives. They believe that to describe something is to endorse it, so they insist that what they do not endorse cannot be described. The spineless textbook publishers and testing companies capitulate with not a peep of protest, indeed with a smile, for the paycheck is very large. "What's left," Ravitch asks, "after the language police and the thought police from the left and right have done their work?" Her answer deserves to be quoted at length:

"Stories that have no geographical location. . . . Stories in which all conflicts are insignificant. Stories in which men are fearful and women are brave. Stories in which older people are never ill. Stories in which children are obedient, never disrespectful, never get into dangerous situations, never confront problems that cannot be easily solved. Stories in which blind people and people with physical disabilities need no assistance from anyone because their handicaps are not handicaps. Stories in which fantasy and magic are banned. Stories about the past in which historical accuracy is ignored. Stories about science that leave out any reference to evolution or prehistoric times. Stories in which everyone is happy almost all the time."

In a word: Fantasyland, a place so wildly disconnected from reality that it makes Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom seem by contrast a painting by Pieter Bruegel or Edvard Munch. The language police are blissfully oblivious to the inescapable truth that "schools compete for children's attention with far more powerful media." Children are assaulted by "powerful stimuli" on TV, the movies, the Internet, in advertising, in pop music, yet in school they are insulated "from any contact in their textbooks with anything that might disturb them, like violence, death, divorce or bad language." As Ravitch says: "No matter. When the school day is done, they will turn again to the videos and music and movies that feed them eroticized violence and surround them with language that knows no constraints. This is as wacky a combination as anyone might dream up: schools in which life has been homogenized, with all conflicts flattened out, within the context of an adolescent culture in which anything goes."

Bear in mind, though, that American kids are a lot smarter than American adults give them credit for being, especially American adults who live in their own fear-haunted, euphemism-enhanced universes. Surely the principal effect of this bowdlerization of texts and tests is merely to increase students' indifference to and contempt for them and the schools that require them.

A child with a rare disease may have to be put in a bubble, but putting the entire American system of elementary and secondary education into one borders on insanity. Yet that is precisely what has happened. Guidelines imposed by textbook publishers sometimes "require writers and artists to tell lies about history" to placate one interest group or another, with the result that "the sanitizing of world history texts has stripped them of their ability to present a critical, intellectually honest assessment of controversial subjects" and that history texts "constantly moralize about the past, as though everyone in 1850 or 1900 or 1950 should have known what we know today and should have shared our enlightened values."

As for serious literature, forget about it: "Most classic literature is unacceptable when judged by the new rules governing references to gender, ethnicity, age, and disability," with the result that it is either bowdlerized beyond recognition or not taught at all. "Untouched by enduring and inspiring literature," Ravitch writes, "the students are left to be molded by the commercial popular culture. . . . As a result, we are systematically failing to introduce the younger generation to the writers who might enlarge their imaginations, enrich their emotional lives, and challenge their settled ways of thinking."

Ravitch's qualifications for drawing these judgments are impeccable and unassailable. She has worked for national administrations of both political parties and holds the rare distinction of being a visiting scholar at both the conservative Hoover Institution and the liberal Brookings Institution. She has no political axes to grind and no ideological agenda to pursue. She is a lucid writer and an absolutely clear thinker. No doubt the year will see a few books of greater literary distinction than "The Language Police," but it's unlikely to bring forth one of greater importance.