REVIEW: “The Language Police” Diane Ravitch Knopf, $24 Censorship can seem outdated in the twenty-first century, but there is a population of Americans who are beholden to an ever-increasing censorship that has been set in place under the guise of political correction, religious conservatism and in some cases partisan revisionism. Our children comprise this population, those who attend the mostly public schools in the nation, exposed to textbooks that have been edited and sieved of accuracy due to opposing forces looking to clean up the evils of history to reflect the desired populism that America stands for. And due to the controlling forces in local and statewide school boards, there is fragile reason to believe this will change. Diane Ravitch, in her book “The Language Police” published in April of this year, exposes what has happened in education in the past decades since standardized textbooks were created. There are clever ways that private organizations have chipped away at history, literature and even mathematics texts in both names of racial equality and religious purification. Ravitch is an education professor at New York University, and was initially involved in designing voluntary nationwide tests for American students under President Clinton, something that has not come to fruition under the Bush administration. She and the design team found that the independent National Assessment Governing Board, also in supervision of the SAT, GRE and other assessments, rejected many questions’ merits during what is called a “bias and sensitivity review”. A question in reference to peanuts was removed due to a potential test-taker who may have an allergy to them. “African slave” must be replaced by “enslaved African”. The mention of owls was deleted due to the fact that the owl represents a cultural taboo for a small national minority. The list of rejected items goes on, some so ridiculous that upon reading them in Ravitch’s book, you wonder if students can be assessed on anything. Ravitch continued her research of these bias and sensitivity reviews, and they are pandemic. Textbook publishers, bearing the brunt of Ravitch’s analysis, have learned to self-censor after years of private organizations demanding it be done for them. “Initially these practices began with the intention of identifying and excluding any conscious or implicit statements of bias against African Americans, other racial or ethnic minorities, and females, whether in tests or textbooks, especially any statements that demeaned members of these groups,” Ravitch writes. “These efforts were entirely reasonable and justified.” But what strikes the reader is that such hypercorrection occurs that history is often revised, subjectified, and politicized. Some topics, such as Roe vs. Wade, deemed too sensitive to edit are just plain excised from discussion. “The result of all this relentless purging is dishonesty, a purposeful shielding of children from anything challenging, controversial, or just plain interesting.” And hence the term “the language police”, as unseen forces keep watch over most historical data taught to children in order to ensure that no one is insulted, left out or discriminated against. It almost sounds quaintly noble, but it is historically insidious, as certain facts, authors and political heroes (and villains) get wiped from global chronology. How is the rewriting of history justified in the context of making sure everyone feels good in the classroom? Ravitch herself does not directly ask this question, but the reader must come to such a crossroads before finishing the book. For instance, Ravitch cites an example from a textbook where pioneer women were described as equals with the men, tilling the land, preparing the meals and readying the horses; they are not depicted quilting, as one might imagine a pioneer woman doing on the trail. However, accurate accounts show that in fact, pioneer women were not called upon to perform all the duties men did. In this example, are elementary-age schoolgirls supposed to infer that they, too, can hoist oxen into the yoke? It is not up to textbooks to provide self-esteem to students via historical inaccuracy, but oftentimes, events have been rewritten purportedly to allow that. Texas and California are two of the nearly two dozen states that approve textbooks statewide for their school districts. Designing textbooks for these two massive markets has proven very effective in homogenizing texts for the classroom. With California alone soaking up 11% of the national text market, publishers will publish one text to satisfy these two states and thereby all states may select the text. When publishers do this (the textbook adoption campaigns can cost them millions of dollars), then districts and teachers have very little selection when it comes to the material used to teach their children. Teachers don’t by necessity have to adhere to the material when they teach lessons; any teacher could easily clarify that those pioneer women rarely were on the level with their male counterparts. But Ravitch states that, “the people who prepare these textbooks don’t seem to have much faith in teachers,” that the books are “teacher-proof”. This does not bode for a good future. Alongside further standardized testing and the growth in district- and statewide curricula, the more that teachers become predestined cogs in others’ educational agendas, then the urge to teach students and add one’s own input is further pressured out of existence. Teachers have little creativity in their teaching methods as it stands, and the greater influence a text can take will correlate to the greater impact the teachers relinquish. As well, teachers at the elementary and junior high levels are dependent on these texts. “Most teachers of history in grades 7-12 have neither a major nor a minor in history,” Ravitch explains. So much for a great deal of teacher input. Ravitch does have faith in the students, owing to their “usual ability to spot a scam,” and that, “much of what is taught to them is phony and isn’t worth remembering”. And Ravtich offers three necessities to rid education of the language police: Competition, sunshine, and educated teachers. I feel the sunshine will be the hardest thing to come by. Education pundits do not focus on the material actually taught in school; if at all, it’s rudimentary, discussing what subjects are taught, not how they are taught. Rhetoric is spent on safety, classroom size, teacher pay, failing districts, bilingual education, funding, extracurricular activities, parent involvement, charter schools, and the list goes on, but not often on historical accuracy, revisionist extremism and the like. When 1,151 adults were polled in a 1998 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll (www.pdkintl.org) about the status of American education, curriculum was not listed as one of the biggest problems in schools. But concerning parental input, 46% of those asked did say that parents should have more say over the selection of books and instructional materials, up slightly from the 1990 survey which showed 43% felt that way. This is one ray of the light that Ravitch is searching for, but it is going to take a great deal of the necessary sunshine to rid American education of the language police. J. Everett R.