Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2003/06/02/the_language_police_on_patrol.php
Monday, June 2, 2003
Last year, an astute New York parent made a shocking discovery about compulsory, statewide Regents examinations. Inspecting passages from three years of the English Language Arts Test, the parent found systematic alterations of original texts. 'Skinny' had been transformed into 'thin' in an excerpt Barrio Boy, and a snippet from Elie Wiesel no longer referenced 'God,' among other changes. These revelations made a big splash in the press, and the New York Department of Education promised to curb the practice. As far as the public was concerned, this doctoring of tests was an isolated incident. As education expert Diane Ravitch argues forcefully in The Language Police, these alterations provided a tiny glimpse into the drastic censorship currently pandemic in public education.
'I decided to write this books as a way of solving a mystery,' Ravitch pens at the tome's opening. Indeed, this expose is the consummation of a lifelong, personal quest for the author. Ravitch relates the anti-Communist crusade undertaken by a group called the Minute Women in Houston during her high school years, as well as her own quest to subvert their attempts by reading books removed from the shelves of her school's library. Much later in life, Ravitch, as the co-author of an education framework in California, experienced the undue influence on textbook content exerted by pressure groups, on which she pins much of the blame for the current wave of censorship. After serving as an assistant secretary in the United States Department of Education under the elder President Bush, she was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board by President Clinton. In this capacity she was first exposed to the insane world of bias and sensitivity reviews.
Having re-entered private life as a professor at New York University, Ravitch drives home a single, unwavering message in The Language Police: library collections, standardized test, and, particularly, textbooks, are being dramatically censored at a high price to the education of America's children. Ravitch speaks not as a soldier of the Left or Right, but rather as a staunch advocate of freedom. While her examples do demonstrate that the majority of censorship occurs in the name of liberal causes, this is partially due more to leftist activists, who have been received more warmly by ideologically-aligned textbook publishers. Whether it be the Council of Interracial Books or conservative watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler, Ravitch spares no one in her attack on censorship.
Since its release, The Language Police has caused quite a stir, but not because it is an epic work of literature. The book is unabashedly polemic, as well as repetitive in its content, examples, and diction. Ravitch's style, however, is lucid, and the body of the book runs a mere one hundred seventy pages. What makes the volume truly outstanding is its incredibly detailed list of outrageous examples, culled not only from the author's personal experience but also a multitude of guidelines, textbooks, and corporate correspondence.
Among the most horrifying anecdotes are those drawn from Ravitch's own work on a now-jettisoned national test proposed by Clinton. One of the stories rejected by the bias and sensitivity panel to which the exam was submitted was that of a blind mountain climber who had scaled Mount McKinley. The panel 'rejected the passage because it suggested that people who are blind are somehow at a disadvantage compared to people who have normal sight.' Also jettisoned were stories relating the patchwork quilting of frontier women (they were supposedly depicted as too submissive), owls (they are taboo for Navajos), and Egypt (descriptions of the way different classes lived constituted elitism).
Ravitch shows that bias and sensitivity reviews claim as victims material that 'offends' anyone, not just typical politically correct sensibilities. The mountain climbing story also displayed a 'regional bias,' while a test prompt asking students to 'identify techniques of exercise appropriate for maintaining a youthful appearance and attitude' displayed an 'age bias' because it contained a 'stereotypical outlook on aging by stressing the desirability of youth.'
The Language Police shows how defining bias as anything that might make any student uncomfortable has produced egregious results. From this litany, Ravitch defines three general classes of censorship. Representational fairness dictates that each textbook look like America. Publisher Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, for instance, included exactly one hundred and forty-six male and female characters in a series of high school literature books, only to be lambasted by the National Organization of Women because the volumes' animal characters were predominantly male. Fairness of language use requires a great many words to be expunged as biased. Ravitch includes 'A Glossary of Banned Words' as Appendix One. The list includes not just the usual targets—gender-specific terms, for instance—but also words like 'inspirational,' which was 'banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities.' The third and most puzzling form of censorship is stereotyping fairness. Ravitch writes that 'what was once a fairly sensible notion of fairness—don't always show women as homemakers—has turned into a presumption that they should never be shown in that role.' Thus, authors often are forced to deny reality by writing exactly counter to stereotypes. 'A wise writer,' Ravitch notes, 'will portray older persons only as healthy, happy, and able to run a marathon.'
Ravitch goes far beyond merely noting these absurdities. The Language Police describes in incisive detail how such pervasive censorship is a hidden secret of publishers, all of which use nearly the same bias and sensitivity guideline. Ravitch documents how, following a series of costly lawsuits, the industry chose to perpetually cave to the demands of special interests rather than risk an unprofitable textbook, the development of which can cost millions of dollars.Moreover, the demands of attempted agenda-setters are not resolved in the open market. The process of textbook adoption, in which panels select volumes to be used statewide, allows pressure groups are able to exert such inordinate power over content by concentrating their lobbying efforts. Special interests often have a national impact by making demands in the particularly large markets of Texas and California.
What is the result of this rampant censorship? According to Ravitch, a substantially diminished education for millions of children, particularly in the subjects of history and literature. Examining state guidelines, Ravitch finds that none have required reading lists (she attaches one of her own as Appendix Two.) 'English language arts standards are about skills,' she pens. They 'are concerned with literacy but not literary appreciation.' In such a paradigm, everything written before 1970 is considered biased, as one publisher explicitly told Ravitch.
History guidelines, too, require little specific knowledge. Moreover, censorship inspires textbooks that reshape history, that transpose pressure groups' ideal 'fair' society of the future onto the past. 'Women were granted the right to vote in 1920' becomes 'women won.' Such distortions are self-defeating, Ravitch feels, because they 'minimize the barriers that women face. [They pretend] that the gender equality of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was a customary condition in the past.' As textbooks also selectively vilify Euro-Americans in a mangled attempt at cultural equality, Ravitch adds that 'students might well wonder if the United States was the only culture in which women had to fight for equal rights.'
The Language Police places the toll of such censorship very high: nothing less than our unified culture has been lost in the effort to appease fractious minorities. 'Great literature is 'relevant',' Ravitch believes, 'not because it echoes the students' race, gender, or social circumstances, but because it speaks directly to the reader across time and across culture.' Abandoning the canon costs American students this commonality. Moreover, in the field of history, embracing multiculturalism has sounded the death knell of 'civil assimilation,' in which e pluribus unum has been replaced by pluribus.
There are short term costs of censorship, as well, according to The Language Police. Quite frankly, the textbooks produced under such a regime are vacuous and boring. America's performance on international tests continue to fall, and Ravitch suspects the boredom of students forced to read dull textbooks is a contributing factor. Also damaging is the myth that what children learn is largely reliant on textbook reading, causing pressure groups to make textbooks an all-or-nothing battleground. The depraved elements of popular culture become that much more appealing to students who are sheltered within school walls for forty hours a week, Ravitch argues.
While long on problems, The Language Police is short on answers. In her concluding chapter, Ravitch provides three selections for curtailing censorship: deregulating textbook adoption, sunshine on censorship, and better-education teachers. Discussion on these points is regrettably short. 'Abolish censorship,' Ravitch reiterates incessantly throughout the book. It is, however, unreasonable to allow children access to all material, as she herself recognizes. How then is reasonable protection to be distinguished from politically-motivated censorship? 'Common sense' is Ravitch's parsimonious answer, but she does not specify.
The Language Police may fall short as a complete treatment of the epidemic of censorship infecting the nation's schools. While leaving the solutions to someone else, Ravitch offers well-researched and angry protest to the sensational impact pressure groups have had on what students learn. Referring to a publisher's unauthorized editing of the book-burning classic Fahrenheit 451, Ravitch quotes author Ray Bradbury as resolving that he would not 'go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.' Neither will Ravitch, and, with The Language Police, she beckons concerned readers to accept a similar challenge.