The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn

From Strand Bookstore

The New York University historian of education discusses the censorship of school texts by politically correct ideologues that dominate American education.

From the Publisher

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 about 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 books—a case of the bland leading the bland.

The Language Police is the first full-scale exposé 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 are—no 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 Police is a book for every educator, concerned parent, and engaged citizen.

Review

Daniel J. Kevles - New York Times Book Review
"...Ravitch's compilation of evidence and argument is overwhelming....Her remedies, along with better-educated teachers: Eliminate the statewide textbooks adoption process, and substitute a competitive market, with school districts choosing their own books and materials. And let the sun shine in by compelling all states and publishers to reveal their bias guidelines and by placing on the Internet all the deliberations of bias and sensitivity panels, including what they reject."

Review

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
"Ms. Ravitch...writes with enormous authority and common sense. She shows how priggish, censorious and downright absurd 'the language police' can be, and she does so with furious logic. Though many of the broader points she makes here have been touched on by other writers...she uses her own knowledge of the education system and a careful reading of current educational material to show just how institutionalized censorship is becoming.... At the end of this book Ms. Ravitch makes three suggestions for stopping censorship within the educational system....A fourth suggestion might be added to that list: reading THE LANGUAGE POLICE as an introduction to the problem, a book that is every bit as alarming as it is illuminating."

More about the book

Diane Ravitch's book is an angry look at the censorship that right-wing (and also politically correct left-wing) groups are able to exercise on educational publishers, who hire "bias and sensitivity" experts to ensure that not one word will be offensive to anyone. Accordingly, books showing dinosaurs, women cooking, owls, candy, and angry people are tabu. In one of many insights into the situation, she points out that conservative groups try to make the world represented in textbooks into an idealized version of the past, while more left-leaning groups try to impose an idealized Utopian future on the material. Ravitch indicts publishers for pandering to the marketplace (represented by fanatical pressure groups) at the expense of children's learning and the widening of their experience. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.