Tests, textbooks: Only men bake cookies in these parts

The Language Police

How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn

Diane Ravitch

Alfred A. Knopf: 272 pp., $24

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What do dinosaurs, mountains, deserts, brave boys, shy girls, men fixing roofs, women baking cookies, elderly people in wheelchairs, athletic African Americans, God, heathens, witches, owls, birthday cake and religious fanatics all have in common? Trick question? Not really. As we learn from Diane Ravitch’s eye-opening book “The Language Police,” all of the above share the common fate of having been banned from the textbooks or test questions (or both) being used in today’s schools.

In the late 1990s, Ravitch -- who had been assistant secretary in the Department of Education during the Bush (Sr.) administration -- was serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, which was overseeing the development of voluntary national tests proposed by the Clinton administration. (It was a proposal that, despite strong support in the polls, was defeated in Congress by the familiar combination of Republicans horrified at “government interference” and Democrats equally leery of using objective standards to monitor student progress.)

Having spent long hours selecting appropriate reading passages for the test, Ravitch was surprised to learn that the passages her committee had chosen had been subjected to a second review by a “bias and sensitivity” panel, which wanted to eliminate many of them.

Among those rejected by the “bias and sensitivity” panel was a passage about the patchwork quilts made by 19th century frontier women: “The reviewers objected to the portrayal of women as people who stitch and sew, and who were concerned about preparing for marriage.” The fact that the passage was historically accurate was considered no defense for its “stereotypical” image of women and girls.

Another story about two young African American girls, one an athlete, the other a math whiz, who help each other learn new skills, was red-flagged for stereotyping blacks as athletic (even though one of the girls was not an athlete but a mathlete).

A passage on the uses and nutritional values of peanuts was rejected because some students are allergic to peanuts. Stranger still, a story about a heroic blind youth who climbed to the top of Mt. McKinley was rejected, not only because of its implicit suggestion that blind people might have a harder time than people with sight, but also because it was alleged to contain “regional bias”: According to the panel’s bizarre way of thinking, students who lived in non-mountainous areas would theoretically be at a “disadvantage” in comprehending a story about mountain climbing. Stories set in deserts, cold climates, tropical climates or by the seaside, Ravitch learned, are similarly verboten as test topics, since not all students have had personal experience of these regions.

Also forbidden: owls (the animals are taboo for Navajos), Mt. Rushmore (offensive to Lakotas), dinosaurs (suggestive of evolution, hence offensive to creationists), dolphins (regionally offensive because they live in the sea) and Mary McLeod Bethune (this early 20th century civil rights pioneer had the lack of foresight to use the no-longer-fashionable word “negro” in the school she founded).

The author of such notable books on education as “The Schools We Deserve” and “Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform,” Ravitch made it her business to investigate “the Language Police.” What she discovered about the roots and ramifications of this eerily Orwellian system is the story told in this book. As the subtitle suggests, it is a story of how pressure groups -- left-wing and right-wing, large and small -- have managed to control not only the language, but even the very subject matter and ideas that appear in the textbooks being used in our schools.

What makes this form of censorship so insidious is that it has not been imposed by the federal government but has been voluntarily embraced by textbook publishers who, quite naturally, want their books to be adopted by schools and by states like California and Texas, where statewide adoptions are the rule. The publishers have voluntarily adopted “bias and sensitivity” guidelines, which echo the guidelines of test development companies, which reflect the guidelines of various state and city agencies, which in turn reflect the concerns and sensitivities of ... well, just about anyone who cares to raise a stink about anything.

Bias guidelines, not to mention routine reviews by “bias and sensitivity panels” (a little industry in itself), have simply become routine practice in the textbook industry. Ravitch believes that the publishers use these guidelines “as a form of preemptive capitulation. With these documents, they broadcast to all likely protestors, ‘Leave us alone, we gave in to your demands long ago.’ ” Publishers rarely challenge this form of censorship: Occasionally they’ve managed to fight off demands by right-wing religious fundamentalists to give creationism equal time in science textbooks, but they have been loath to stand up to the demands of what these days passes for the left.

Meanwhile, thanks to the fundamentalists, “controversial” subjects like divorce, magic, ghosts and disobedient children have been banned from textbooks, while, thanks to their left-wing counterparts, children need not encounter nasty words like “handicapped,” “hearing-impaired,” “handyman,” “fraternize,” “brotherhood,” “actress,” “heathen” or “backward country” in their increasingly banal, denatured reading.

And, as Ravitch’s investigation amply demonstrates, the trouble with this strategy of “preemptive capitulation” is that it has merely fed the tiger. Ravitch relates how history textbooks written by prominent champions of multiculturalism and expressly designed to be inclusive and inoffensive have still come under fire from various racial and ethnic groups. “Rewarding groups that complain by allowing them to censor words and images that they don’t like only encourages them,” she concludes. “Censorship should be stopped, not rewarded with compliance and victories.”

Instead, students are now reading history books that, to avoid the appearance of “ethnocentrism,” eschew the very idea of progress. One middle school textbook that Ravitch describes “lauds every world culture as advanced, complex, and rich with artistic achievements, except for the United States.” Textbooks “sugarcoat practices in non-Western cultures that they would condemn if done by Europeans or Americans.... They condemn slavery in the western world but present slavery in Africa and the Middle East as benign.... “ Publishers of literature textbooks actually subscribe to the notion that “everything written before 1970 was either gender biased or racially biased.” Good-bye to Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Wordsworth, Keats, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and Shakespeare.

In her closing chapter, Ravitch presents concrete and practical proposals for fixing what is wrong. Discontinuing the practice of statewide textbook adoptions, she believes, would open up the marketplace to competition and allow schools and teachers to choose books for themselves. She also urges “sunlight” as the best disinfectant: If publishers and states were required to publish their guidelines and allow the public to be privy to how the “bias and sensitivity” panels make their determinations, Ravitch feels confident that the public would laugh the most ludicrous of them out of existence. It would also be a help, she thinks, for journals and newspapers to publish reviews of textbooks, just as they now review trade books.

Lucid, forceful, written with insight, passion, compassion and conviction, “The Language Police” is not only hair-raisingly readable but deeply reasonable. It should be required reading not only for parents, teachers and educators, but for everyone who cares about history, literature, science, culture and indeed the civilization in which we live.