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The Language Police strike again
Ravitch speaks out against textbook censors
By John Davidson
Collegian Opinions Editor
Mount Rushmore does not exist. Neither do
owls. There were no class distinctions in ancient Egypt, and
Spanish explorers never conquered the Incas.
Welcome to the world of textbooks and standardized
tests, where nothing bad has ever happened and no one ever grows
old and feeble; where blindness is not a "disadvantage"
and marriages have never ended in separation or divorce; where
there is no death, disease, politics, religion, unemployment,
expensive consumer goods, rats, cockroaches, unsafe situations
or social problems.
This is the world that bias and sensitivity
reviewers have created for American schoolchildren at the behest
of test and textbook publishers and political interest groups.
In her alarming new book, The Language Police, Diane Ravitch
exposes the outrageous logic and intricate rules that govern
educational materials in public schools.
Ravitch reveals in detail a "regime of
censorship that has quietly spread throughout educational publishing
in response to pressure groups from both the left and the right."
Most major publishers of educational materials have adopted
bias guidelines for self-censorship, hiring bias and sensitivity
reviewers to go through texts, censoring those words and images
they deem upsetting, unfamiliar, unseemly or offensive. But
these guidelines have a peculiar and broad definition of "bias,"
declaring it to be anything in a test item that might cause
any student to be distracted or upset for any reason.
Although the desire to eliminate bias against
racial or ethnic minorities and women from tests and textbooks
is commendable, industry censorship has gotten out of hand;
it has broadened its scope and invented an entire vocabulary
of terms to describe different kinds of bias-censoring words,
images and ideas no reasonable person would ever think objectionable.
These reviewers ensure fairness in testing
and textbook publishing by means of an elaborate language code
that bans many common words and expressions, often to the point
of absurdity. Ravitch explains and interprets the bias guidelines
of Riverside Publishing, which represent the standard methods
publishers use to identify bias-representational fairness, language
usage and stereotyping.
"Representational fairness" is meant
to ensure that no group is overrepresented or underrepresented
(equal numbers of males and females, ethnic groups, ages, physical
disabilities, socioeconomic background, etc.). Representational
fairness also means that material must be "relevant"
to the life experiences of the student, so that, for instance,
there can be no stories set in the mountains or by the sea,
since this would be "regionally biased" against students
not familiar with those settings.
"Language usage" refers to particular
words that may betray some bias, such as man in the word "mankind,"
African slave instead of "enslaved African," or wheelchair
bound instead of "a person who uses a wheelchair."
This category is perhaps the most Orwellian, and Ravitch provides
a telling glossary of banned words that clearly demonstrates
what sorts of ideas the censors are trying to avoid; they seem
most concerned that any suggestion of traditional gender and
family roles be eliminated, as well as any and all suggestions
that men and women are somehow different.
The third category, "stereotyping,"
is particularly refined and consists of numerous subcategories
of specific stereotypes. The Riverside guidelines warn against
"emotional stereotyping"-women must not be portrayed
as weepy and emotional and men may not be portrayed as brave
and strong. "Occupational stereotyping" includes depictions
of Irish policemen, African American maids or Asian Americans
working in a laundry. "Activities stereotyping" is
the portrayal of men playing sports or working with tools, women
cooking or caring for children, and older people doing sedentary
things like sewing or fishing (old people must always be portrayed
doing something active, lest children get the idea that people
slowly grow weak and frail as they age).
This kind of reasoning is the status quo among
testing companies and textbooks publishers; a built-in system
of control over every word and idea a student may
encounter on a test or in a text. This "beneficent self-censorship,"
Ravitch explains, has evolved from pressure from the religious
right to avoid certain topics-magic, disobedient behavior, divorce,
secular humanism, evolution-and pressure from the radical left
to avoid words and images that suggest anything other than a
perfectly multicultural and egalitarian world where all are
joined together in tolerance and unity, and yet separated by
their various differences into cultural "subgroups."
In well-documented and numerous examples,
Ravitch shows how the results of all these good intentions are
texts and tests that are not only bland and colorless, but unrealistic
and therefore irrelevant to the student, whose daily influences
and experiences teach him far more about the world as it really
is than do watered down, sanitized, euphemized, post-1970 literature
anthologies. And although the point of reading great literature
is to expand students' imaginations by exposing them to new
ideas, this notion of education is fundamentally opposed to
the regime of censorship described by Ravitch.
In the end, the language police are open enemies
of education because their ultimate goal is not just to stop
students from using objectionable words, but also to stop them
from having objectionable thoughts. Acting as though public
schools are total institutions, censors are employed to purge
history and human nature of all their unpleasantness, presenting
the student with a flattering, safe, utopian world that does
not really exist.
At a time when schools across the country
are failing to produce educated or, in some cases, even literate
young people, The Language Police helps us to understand why:
blatant, politically motivated censorship of school texts and
tests.
They used to call it brain-washing.
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