The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn Paperback – May 11, 2004

I first heard Prof. Ravitch interviewed on Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR. Another reader heard about it on Savage Nation. If the book is highlighted on both a left-wing and right-wing radio show, what does that tell you about the even-handedness with which Ms. Ravitch approaches the subject? As an independent, I found the balance to be refreshing.Disregard claims that she "falls back on left bashing". Though she definitely makes light of some of the more extreme examples of the feminist and multiculturalist activism, she gives the religious fundamentalists a taste of the same medicine. She even highlights examples of right-wing censorship with her own experiences working in her high school library in Houston during the McCarthy era, and points out the problems that she had as the child of "Yellow Dog Democrats" in that environment. In fact, Ms. Ravitch was an appointee of both the first Bush and the Clinton Administrations. It is hard to believe that the reviewers accusing her of bias have read the book, though it could be that they are so biased that their view is distorted.Some seem to believe that she just doesn't understand the value of Social Content codes, or that the codes don't mandate the excesses which she illustrates. I think they misunderstand her, or have not read the book carefully and open mindedly enough. Sure, we must be sensitive of other cultures, but not to the point that we decide not to read Huckleberry Finn because Twain uses the n-word. Although bans of this book should be examples of extremism, they have been so common in our country that censorship of this book is almost mainstream. As anyone who has actually read the story knows, Twain ironically shows Jim to be the only rational, honest, intelligent, and sane man on the whole trip, all the while people hypocritically treat him as subhuman. Sure, we must have equal treatment of women and minorities, but students should know that was not so in the past. Her point is that modern textbooks are not only avoiding intelligent discussion of such problems, but in some cases are flatly trading off truth (lying) in the name of balance and political correctness, and the reason is the unintended consequences of those Social Content codes. The codes may not mandate the sillines explicitly, but the extremist, litigious groups that follow these issues demand extreme interpretations of those codes, with hilarious results.Consider one effect of the Social Content codes: everything prior to about 1970 does not contain the balance sought. Therefore, all literature produced prior to 1970 is eliminated, whether it be Shakespeare, Twain, Dickens, or any number of other outstanding writers. Heck, even Upton Sinclair portrayed women as domestic and men as strong and active. Actually, it's worse than that, since many of the loudest groups demand that not only do the subjects have to be balanced, but the authors have to be as well. They claim that only black authors can write about black subjects, Asians about Asians, etc. I guess they have never heard of Alex Kotlowitz or Joseph Conrad - but of course they haven't, because each of those authors portrayed minorities in roles other than upper middle class, and so would be banned. If you narrow the population of allowable authors on grounds other than merit, you reduce the probability that you will get good literature. What does that leave for children to read? Bad literature produced by hack writers.The other side of the coin is that the Religious Right demands avoidance of controversial subjects. Great literature examines controversial subjects. Therefore, all great literature is banned. We are left, again, with pap and pablum.As Milton Friedman has pointed out, one of the worst trends in education has been the consolidation of school districts. He cites the number that existed when he was a child, and notes that the number has fallen by orders of magnitude as districts consolidate. Eventually, we will have 50 state districts, then 1 federal district. When you have many districts, you have many laboratories. Each is better able to tailor the curriculum to the local tastes and culture, and the result is a vibrant and multicultural American culture - the Melting Pot. When you have few districts, you have less innovation. When you have to mollify millions rather than dozens of parents, you must strive to offend the least common denominator, so you must "blandify" the content of the curriculum to a thin gruel.Which brings me to another minor point that Ravitch points out. If you have a thin, bland, boring curriculum presented at school, and that competes with the loud, colorful culture of MTV, Mickey D, and the local mall, which do you think will reverberate more with kids? Which is more influential? Try as you might to brainwash kids into thinking that girls and boys, old and young, abled and disabled are interchangeable (the Left), or that everything in the past was good, the government and parents should not be questioned, and Christianity is the only religion (the Right), they are going to learn that these notions are false. Wouldn't it be better to teach them the truth and deal with it directly and therefore retain their respect, then to teach them a lie, ignore the consequences as they grapple with it on their own, and watch as they develop a strong cynicism with regard to schools, parents, and social institutions?

The desire of textbook makers and assessment companies to never challenge a student's preexisting sensibilities is very much the reason that Diane Ravitch wrote her new book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.Dr. Ravitch is a former member of the first Bush administration's Department of Education. She is currently a professor at New York University . Despite her past political affiliations, I'd like to firmly state that this is not a "conservative" book. The author painstakingly documented that censorship, or pressure, upon textbook manufacturers comes from both the right and the left. Indeed, she has separate chapters devoted to analyzing censorship from both sides of the political spectrum. This book is not in any way a polemic. It is instead a professional, objective account of what has happened to the educational resources industry within the United States .This is a fine work of scholarship, as Dr. Ravitch relies on primary source materials as a means of bolstering her conclusions about the current milquetoast world of instructional decision making. She personally examines the textbooks, diagnostic devices, and publishing house guidelines of the companies she investigates. The results will be particularly disturbing to the layman who has little knowledge of the workings of educrats and educationese.I recommend this work to the reader, as it is a fountain of rare and useful information, but I would like to mention that, at least to this reviewer, it was far from a page turner. It principally deals with dry subject matter. In fact, you might say that it is the vocation of publishing and assessment companies to be as bland in their creation of products as is humanly possible.The truly "laugh out loud" portion of The Language Police can be found in her "Glossary of Banned Words." I recommend reading this first as you'll have conversation for the rest of the week. None of the words that you'd think would be in there are present (they must be too obvious). We see that "abnormal" is verboten due to it demeaning those with disabilities. This would seem to negate a semester long graduate course I once took called "Abnormal Psychology." I should not be surprised if the class is now called "Variations of Normal Psychology." Alas, I spoke too soon, as "normal," the antonym of abnormal, has been banned as well. Further, you now cannot use the term "American" to describe citizens of the United States (I'm not kidding), as it discriminates against those from Canada and Mexico who are also part of the greater "American" landmass. More moronically, you can't put into print the words "beast, fanatic, fat, jungle, lunatic, maid, special, strange, yacht" and "costume" as some bureaucrat behind an AV machine must quiver at their pronunciation as well.The dear educational publishers and their word enemy list offer an answer to the eternal question of whether one is a man or mouse. It has now been decisively answered that they are the latter, as the merchandisers appear to be sincerely frightened of rodents in general. Dr. Ravitch elaborates, "It is hard to imagine that a fourth-grade student would be paralyzed by dread by reading a story that included descriptions of mice. Clearly forbidden by such a prohibition is any excerpt from books like E.B. White's Stuart Little or Robert Lawson's Ben and Me."

This is a compelling read about the effect of lobby groups on US publishers of educational text books. The right wing (fundamentalist Christian) lobbies for change in content, while the politically correct left lobbies for change in language. The result is English test papers that are specially written to placate all parties and which do not - cannot - draw on the classics of American literature. The dumbing down of language and falsification of history described here are hair-raising. Not all the changes are unreasonable, but enough are so absurd as to be dangerous. There should be a public debate on the issues raised, and an investigation into the 'guidelines' used by UK publishers.

This excellent (and depressing) study brings to light a serious problem in American education, some signs of which are becoming visible in the UK. All educators should be aware of Ravitch's findings, painstakingly assembled over several years. Of value too is her comprehensive list of literary texts that should be on the curriculum for each age group. It's also one of the best introductions to political correctness.

Ultimately I enjoyed this book but for different reasons that I had perhaps anticipated.Assuming that this would be a wide and far reaching exposition of censorship and its impact on society at large, I duly purchased this text, only to find it far from met those aims and objectives. Instead what I found was an articulate (if somewhat repetitive) diatribe pertaining solely to the very narrow concern of k-12 textbook procurement for the American school system, or rather that procurement system.That textbooks are censored is not new, that content is reviewed and edited is not new, that pressure groups push to have their vested interests served (and those of other's excluded) is not revelationary, that language has (thankfully) been kicked into shape regarding overt racist and sexist language simply reflects the shift in what society has elected as being its current set of values. So what's new? Not much really, certainly not much that the average articulate citizen has not guessed at for themselves.The major flaws in this text are as follows:i) As the title alludes to, this is an historian's take on an issue which is really outside of her remit, and this quite often shines through,ii) Dr. Ravitch seems to have forgotten she is seventy-three years old and that children and young adults don't learn like either she does or did, that their pedagogical narrative is a totally different educational paradigm to hers, so why isn't she aware of this elementary fact? She seems totally unaware that whilst she may hate textbooks full of graphics (she constantly harps on about this fact), that textbooks like that are NOT AIIMED AT SEVENTY-THREE YEAR OLD PEOPLE! They are squarely aimed at young people who are highly visually-literate and require very different kinds of stimuli than was the case when she attended school in the post-war world. Why she keeps revealing her acute ignorance of current pedagogical paradigms is anyone's guess.Ultimately this book is a worthwhile read for it offers a cohesive voice in the wider censorship debate, a debate which should be engaged in at everyone's dinner-table, irrelevant of which side of the fence they sit on. That it was myopic in parts, repetitive in others, and that it could easily have been half as long is something her editors should have considered.