The New Pantagruel 1.2

Stalin 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.”

The epigraphs from Orwell at the head of multiple chapters make clear Ravitch’s opinion of the motives behind this dishonesty. There is a cadre of social engineers, the author claims, who seek to change the world by first changing how the world is presented in our classrooms. As an example, she points to the bias guidelines of Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley, a 161-page manifesto for the publisher’s editors, writers, and illustrators. The guidelines stipulate the fair representation of all racial and ethnic groups, men and women, the elderly, disabled persons, short and tall, heavy and thin. There are prohibitions against biased terms like “the blind” and “the deaf” and value-laden adjectives like “primitive.” The aim of these stipulations, according to the guidelines, is not simply to eliminate prejudice but to create a society of “multicultural persons,” individuals who understand and appreciate the distinctive ways of thinking, acting, and believing demonstrated by members of each group. Sacrificed in this project is fidelity to historical accuracy. The only medical advances in pre-modern history came from Islamic civilization. The Constitution was plagiarized from the Iroquois. Stories about African-Americans must not depict slavery, or present blacks as athletes or entertainers. Thus, Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson are airbrushed from history.

Ravitch invited readers of her book to submit their own snippets of this surreal universe presented in textbooks, standards exams, and state education guidelines. She recently offered a selection of those submissions in The Wall Street Journal. In New Jersey, the bias review committee for the state standards test removed a reading passage because of the appearance of the words “Negro” and “colored person,” even though the passage had been written by Langston Hughes. My own state, Michigan, bans from its standards exams any reference to aliens and flying saucers. Harcourt/Steck/Vaughn publishers requires the deletion of any illustration showing a person eating with his left hand, in deference to Muslim sensibilities. And in the interest of gender-neutral language, one human development textbook features an altered (yet grammatically incorrect) version of Bob Dylan’s famous question: “How many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult?”

Ravitch’s inquiry prompted me to consider how this process of activist editing is at work in my own sphere of education: the college classroom. The college textbook market is a different beast than the elementary and secondary school market. In the latter case, decisions are made at a level higher than the individual teacher, whether the school-building administration or a state-wide board. In contrast, nearly all college instructors have partial or complete autonomy in their choices of texts. Publishers must sell to a range of customers, as opposed to the politically bound boards that select textbooks for elementary and secondary classrooms. Presumably then, the choices available to college instructors are more varied in content and interpretative angles. Yet, a quick glance at the texts that nearly all college students encounter, the composition-course reader, indicates that the same process of programmatic editing is at work.

Intended to offer students (generally freshmen) models of quality work and catalysts for their own thinking, composition-course readers claim to offer a broad-reaching sample of American writing–short fiction, memoir, journalism–on an array of topics relevant to contemporary American society. In their selection of texts, the editors advocate the aim of creating “multicultural persons,” young people who will understand and appreciate the distinct thinking of particular groups. The editors of the Prentice-Hall reader state their hope that the student readers will “develop a greater appreciation for the richness and texture of American culture and the sources from which it comes.” The short bios of different volumes’ contributors note the authors’ hyphenated identities (Chinese-American, Korean-American, Greek-American, etc.), and their stories and essays offer various takes on the experiences of immigrants and minorities. One Chinese-American writer describes walking through her neighborhood each Saturday to attend, against her will, Chinese language school; another inventories the menagerie of exotic foods and spices in her mother’s American kitchen, the necessary ingredients for authentic Chinese food. The volume published by Prentice-Hall features essays by student writers asserting their ethnic identities: one young woman insists on being called a “Chicana” rather than “Hispanic” or “Latina”; the daughter of Peruvian immigrants outlines the experiences of her parents upon their arrival in California; another writer, an Asian-American student, writes about the stereotyping of Asian-American students.

The common feature of the essays in the readers is self-absorption. In addition to the slate of homogenized “multicultural narratives,” one finds articles on the Las Vegas wedding industry and the design of computer keyboards. We can read a memoirist’s apology for why she chose to stop being a vegetarian. Body image is a popular topic: a white woman disparages the unreal expectations imposed by the Barbie doll, while an African-American proclaims how she, unlike white women, is proud of her rounded frame. There are essays on car ads, Star Trek, cyber-culture, Spanglish, and the ambitious, organized youth of today. One of the college readers now on the market, The Bedford Reader, opens with a quote from Saul Bellow: “A writer is a reader moved to emulate.” The volume’s editors go on to explain that the aim of their collection is “to move students to be writers, through reading and emulating the good writing of others.” What good writing does the book offer? Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allen Poe, H.L. Mencken, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, and Shelby Steele. But we also have Meghan Daum, “known for her provocative, witty essays,” writing on sex in the 1990s; Sarah Vowell, “best known for the smart, witty essays she delivers on public radio,” on her conservative, gun-shooting father; and Bill Bryson, “at his witty, peevish best,” as he gripes over programming his VCR. Yes, they are sharp critics of contemporary America, brimming with insolence, annoyance, sarcasm. But are they good writers? Writers to be held up for emulation? Is witty banter over the mundanities of life the writing we wish to offer to students as models for instruction?

Diane Ravitch’s principal concern, in spotlighting the practices of the textbook editors and review panels, is not the Newspeak of multiculturalists, it is this demise of literary appreciation in American culture. Teachers and textbooks, she believes, should introduce young readers to the best writings in our language and, when possible, to the best writings of other cultures. As Ravitch states:

Yes, the editors of today’s college readers do seek to broaden students’ horizons. They offer a menu of tepid liberal criticism intended to jolt their readers out of their upper-middle class mindsets with recitals of immigrant narratives that are supposed to inspire empathy. But these essays fall far short of truly challenging their readers. They focus solely on the contemporary, the transient, and, in most cases, the self. Rather than broadening perspectives, they wallow in immediate circumstances and self-reflection. In the end, the essays offered in these college-classroom readers, essays offered as models of good writing, have all the weight of an NPR essay. They are narcissistic vignettes, snaps of the moment, snotty criticism masquerading as deep analysis. They are witty, harmless, forgotten by the time you get out of the car. But they have become literature, our literature.

While visiting a coffee house in Prague a decade ago, I took note of all the young Americans sitting in a cloud of cigarette smoke along the back wall, intently writing in their notebooks. A Swedish girl asked me: “Are all Americans writers?” Yes, it appears so, I conceded. But not only are they all writers, they are all great writers. Open a college reader or a secondary-level lit textbook and you find a mish-mash of the classic, the mediocre, and the undistinguished. For Ravitch, this is lamentable–not only because it marks a dilution of our literary culture, but, more importantly, because it dilutes and confuses American education. Today’s literature textbooks, she writes,

What is literature? What is great writing? According to Ravitch, the editors of today’s textbooks have turned all writing into great writing. “Writing is writing; text is text,” she observes. “Everything is treated as literature, just because it happens to be printed.” The introduction to one college reader now on the market, a reader used in classes that teach students how to write, offers such a vision of the equal worth of every text. According to the editors, writing is: “definitive and essential part of daily human experience. Whether we write a shopping list or a great novel, we use a tool without which we would find ourselves isolated.” There is not good writing, or bad writing. The great novel is on the same plane as the scribbled shopping list: all is a means of communication, to be judged and valued only insofar as it meets that simple goal. Taken together, these readers, as well as texts in the other disciplines, offer a complete vision of an ideal realm: all signs of distinction, of ordering, are erased; in our vision of history, the relations of the sexes, the races, the generations, in our means of communication, there are no judgments made.

This is a political vision, an ideological vision. And, according to Ravitch, there are ideologues at work in devising and expressing this vision in today’s textbooks. But these over-educated editors and advisers working for multi-billion-dollar publishers are not the only culprits. The distortions and dishonesty in our children’s textbooks are not generated from some elite editor’s vision of a socialist, secular, multicultural anti-America. The ideal world presented in these textbooks is emphatically American. It is an America we demand. Textbook publishers craft their products with attention to their market: not the kids in the classrooms or the teacher behind the desk, but the board of education. In nearly two dozen states, a state-level board of education makes decisions regarding textbook adoptions. As political bodies, these boards are subject to shifting cultural currents and public opinion of voters, expressed in elections as well as in public hearings on textbook adoptions. The publishers, therefore, cannot market a book solely on its education merit; they must also pay heed to the political climate in that state, to the wishes of its populace. According to Ravitch, two large states with state-level boards are the Scylla and Charybdis of the textbook industry. On the one side, California is a potent, swirling pool of ethnic-group activists, atheists, feminists, gay-rights advocates, and Greens. The state has institutionalized guidelines which closely match those of the textbook publishers, insisting on representation of all social and ethnic groups, and the elimination of any “adverse reflection” of those groups. Ravitch herself served as a consultant in the textbook adoption process in California. To her surprise, even a textbook series written by a champion of revisionist social history, Gary Nash of UCLA, books she describes as “most multicultural histories ever written,” was denounced by representatives of various ethnic, religious, and gender groups. But, even though one president of the California board admitted that the state’s stipulations require books “that are not realistic,” publishers are willing to meet those demands. This one state, after all, represents 11% of the national textbook market.

On the other side of this narrow channel is the rock of Texas, where the political climate is, needless to say, much different. There, the pressure on the state board does not come from feminists, gays, atheists, Muslims, and Armenians. It comes from Christians. Most prominent of the Christian education activists in Texas are Mel and Norma Gabler, who have reviewed textbooks for four decades and have appeared on numerous religious programs as well as network news and talk shows. Their influence in the state’s textbook adoption process is substantial, and in 1999 the Texas Board of Education voted to honor the couple for their years of service to the state. Under the name Educational Research Analysts, the Gablers and their associates scour textbooks for factual errors as well as pronounced presentations of evolution, “women’s-lib animus against men,” references to the occult, foul language, suggestions of sexuality, “amoral storylines normalizing ethical cynicism and anti-social behavior,” and criticism of limited government, capitalism, and industrialization. In their standards for literature texts, they call for stories that accord with a straightforward, conservative morality. Readings should present a world “that rewards virtue and punishes vice, where good and evil are not moral equivalents, and where problems have solutions.” Stories must present models of “civility, sensitivity, humaneness, and non-destructiveness” and “positive attitudes toward, and relations among, children, parents, and others.” And, of course, literary works must depict “no sensational violence, offensive language or illustrations, occultism, or deviant lifestyles (e.g., homosexuality).”

Surprisingly, the textbook publishers are able to navigate, carefully, the channel between California and Texas. The demand of multicultural activists for works that do not depict ethnic groups in a negative light corresponds to the Gablers’ prohibition of “politically-correct stereotypes of oppressors and/or victims by race, class, or gender.” If references to slavery are disturbing to the descendents of slaves, then they are also disturbing to the descendents of slave-owners. Easy solution: remove references to slavery. The result of these pressures from multicultural activists on one side and conservative Christians on the other are textbooks sanitized of derogatory language, racial and social inequities, and depictions of violence and poverty. Our children thus have a safe, supportive environment in which to learn, at least within the covers of their textbooks.

Should we not be happy with these textbooks? After all, do we not wish for a more equal society, without the stains of racism? Don’t we long to protect our children from exposure to sex, slurs, and violence? Surely, the various watchdog organizations should be applauded for their efforts to defend Christian perspectives in American public education. Yes, perhaps. But not if these organizations, and individual Christians, are motivated to defend their own beliefs and viewpoints, rather than desiring to truly improve education. In the end, when Christians, fearing what might happen to our children if exposed to anything “contrary to our beliefs,” work to eliminate that offensive material, we follow a path parallel with the multicultural activists and the editors of college readers. The motivation is not education, it is self-affirmation: the insistence that my convictions, my experiences, my agenda take precendence over all others. These competing claims over correct orientations have led, for those with the resources, to the balkanization of education–with isolated hamlets waving the flags of their own agendas. But in the American public schools, which must serve the children of all citizens, these contesting adult egos result only in sanitized, dumbed-down, dishonest textbooks. And a dumbed-down, dishonest education. “With everything that might offend removed,” Ravitch concludes, “the textbooks lacked the capacity to inspire, sadden, or intrigue their readers.” We must ask, what is more compelling–and instructive? An educational literature that presents a world in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished, “where problems have solutions,” and we can be assured that our children will be reinforced in our beliefs? Or, a literature that depicts, say, the anguish of Job? We might seek to have our children read only that which is just and pure and lovely. But in our attempts to purge, we will likely cast out the excellent and the true. And that is the stuff of a true education.

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