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Language Police : How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn

ISBN: 9780375414824 | 0375414827

Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Pub. Date: 4/1/2003

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Summary Table of Contents Author Biography

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

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 ... MOREabout 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 booksa case of the bland leading the bland. The Language Policeis the first full-scale expose 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 areno 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 Policeis a book for every educator, concerned parent, and engaged citizen.

Private interest groups have always had a hand in shaping school texts. But in recent years, they have pressured publishers and state officials to purge textbooks and tests of any potentially offensive language or images. In this hard-hitting analysis, Diane Ravitch-the nation's leading historian of American education-explains the causes and consequences of this widespread censorship. Passionate and polemical, this controversial book probes a major intellectual scandal: political correctness of the left and right run amok.

Acknowledgments

A Note to the Reader

Forbidden Topics, Forbidden Words

(16)

The New Meaning of Bias

... MORE

(12)

Everybody Does It: The Textbook Publishers

(19)

Everybody Does It: The Testing Companies

(12)

Censorship from the Right

(17)

Censorship from the Left

(18)

The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoptions

(15)

Literature: Forgetting the Tradition

112

(21)

History: The Endless Battle

133

(24)

The Language Police: Can We Stop Them?

157

(14)

Appendix 1 A Glossary of Banned Words, Usages, Stereotypes, and Topics

171

(32)

Appendix 2 The Atkinson-Ravitch Sampler of Classic Literature for Home and School

203

(32)

Notes

235

(8)

Bibliography

243

(4)

Index

247

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She was assistant secretary in charge of research in the U.S. Department of Education in the administration of President George H. W. Bush and was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board by President Bill Clinton. The author of seven previous books on education, including the critically acclaimed Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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