the New Pantagruel

Skewed, Sterile and Soulless: In the Land of the Language Police

Diane Ravitch's The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, reviewed by Bruce Berglund

talin once remarked that writers are engineers of human souls. According to Diane Ravitch, that assignment has been assumed by the editors and advisory boards of the major textbook publishing houses. Ravitch, an historian of education at New York University and Assistant Secretary of Education under Bush pére, offers in The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn an exposé of the agendas at work in the textbook industry and the skewed products that the publishers produce. In schoolrooms across the country, Johnny and Jane take their lessons from literature readers, history surveys, and civics texts that depict utopias free of conflict and inequality. Stereotyping along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, occupation, and age is not simply averted in these texts, it is consciously inverted to create a realm of fairness and empowerment. Children don’t misbehave, and the elderly run marathons. But, in these same texts, deserts and mountains are erased from the landscape, all so that young readers from places without deserts or mountains will not be disadvantaged or disturbed. The world presented in today’s textbooks is one of harmony–the world we wish our children to inherit. But, Ravitch warns, this paradise is ultimately skewed, sterile, and soulless.

The Language Police:
How Pressure Groups
Restrict What Students Learn
by Diane Ravitch
Knopf, April 2003 272 pages
ISBN: 0375414827 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 1400030641 (Paper)

Ravitch began her investigation of the textbook industry after serving on a federal assessment board during the Clinton Administration. She and her fellow board members had formulated questions for a proposed national standards exam, selecting excerpts from children’s magazines and anthologies that would test the reading abilities of fourth graders. The board members later discovered that their choices had been rejected by the company contracted to administer the exam, Riverside Publishing, which conducts the widely-used Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Riverside’s “bias and sensitivity review” panel had recommended the elimination of various passages due to their offensive content. A passage on patchwork quilting by frontier women was rejected for its stereotyping of women as “soft” and “submissive.” An essay about owls was stricken because owls are taboo to Navajos. References to class distinctions in a historical sketch of life in ancient Egypt were marked for their “elitist” tone. The panel rejected unanimously a story about dolphins due its regional bias against students who live nowhere near the ocean. And a remarkable true story of a blind man who climbed Mt. McKinley was scratched for its bias against blind people. According to the review panel, blindness could not be presented as a disability to an aspiring mountain climber; instead, it must be presented as simply another physical characteristic, like hair color.

Ravitch and her colleagues were astonished by the review panel’s findings, and she began exploring the role of such panels in textbook publishing. In the $4 billion textbook industry, the four major companies and their subsidiary imprints all have such panels, which are usually composed of specialists in ESL, diversity training, and special education. The review panels are alert to anything in a text, whether a written passage or illustration, that would distract or upset a particular student, thereby impeding his learning. Among the proscribed topics in Riverside’s bias guidelines are subjects with the obvious potential to upset young readers–abortion, violence, scorpions, snakes–as well as topics whose offensiveness is debatable: magic, evolution (including dinosaurs), holidays (even birthdays and Thanksgiving), mice (no Stuart Little), and coffee and tea (textbooks must model healthy habits). Any hint of stereotyping must be removed: thus, women cannot be nurses or mothers; men cannot be engineers or plumbers; Asian-Americans cannot be depicted as good students; African-Americans cannot be good athletes. Clearly, such prohibitions cast suspicion on most older literature. Indeed, Riverside’s president acknowledged to Ravitch’s standards board that “everything written before 1970 was either gender biased or racially biased.”

Ravitch’s critique is not a curmudgeon’s harrumph against multiculturalism. Instead, her grievance is over the artificiality, the vapidity of the world presented in today’s textbooks. The review committees’ lists of banned topics are not based on research into children’s actual responses to such topics, but rather on the determinations of adults. Texts therefore are not the products of any creative process; rather, they are engineered composites. The publishers’ list of proscriptions leave a narrow–and in many ways perverted–imaginative landscape, one that excludes lessons of hardship, injustice, and tragedy. The world our children read about is cleaner, softer, brighter, but it is, ultimately, a lie. “The result of all this relentless purging,” Ravitch writes, “is dishonesty, a purposeful shielding of children from anything challenging, controversial, or just plain interesting.”

All Pages | 1 |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5