How the Thought Police Rewrite Textbooks and America's History
NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2003 MIAMI – Diane Ravitch hammers away and hammers away, and even a reader going into her book with a healthy dose of skepticism comes away with the conviction that the "language police" must be fired.
It's hard to believe when she says guidelines by the Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley textbook publishers demand that people "over the age of 65 must be fully represented in text and illustrations; there must be a larger number of older women than older men, because 55 percent of older persons are women."
But the book "The Language Police" is so relentless and so well-documented that after a while you have to believe.
Ravitch says there is an institutionalized system among the four major book publishers - two U.S.-owned, one Dutch and one British - to keep anything the least bit offensive out of textbooks produced for kindergartners through 12th graders.
The same is true for the producers of tests.
Some of the examples are not only appalling, they're funny, including:
# "Adam and Eve," should be replaced with "Eve and Adam" to demonstrate that males do not take priority over females.
# "Birth defect" should be replaced with "people with congenital disabilities."
# "Busboy" should be replaced with "dining room attendant."
# "Cowgirl" and "cowboy" should be replaced with "cowhand."
# "Deaf-mute" should be replaced by "person who can't hear or speak."
# "Huts" is branded as ethnocentric and should be replaced with small houses.
# "Majority group" is banned as offensive reference to cultural difference.
# Dinosaurs are banned because they evoke the subject of evolution.
And on it goes.
Works of literature written before 1970 are almost always taboo because they are bound to have something politically incorrect in them.
Shakespeare Isn't P.C.
Goodbye Mark Twain, goodbye Ernest Hemingway, goodbye Chaucer and goodbye Shakespeare, to mention only a handful.
Ravitch said the goal sought by the "politically correct left" and the "morally correct right" is a homogenized, boring society.
The book companies react to these groups because they want to sell books, and any whiff of controversy will end chances for a sale to a state or a government school district.
"Censors from the right aim to restore an idealized vision of the past, an Arcadia of happy family life, in which the family was intact, comprising a father, a mother, and two or more children, and went to church every Sunday," Ravitch wrote.
"Censors from the left believe in an idealized vision of the future, a utopia in which egalitarianism prevails in all social relations," she wrote. "In this vision, there is no dominant group, no dominant father, no dominant race and no dominant gender."
The examples cited above show that the left-wing thought police have had far more success in imposing their agenda.
History books get their licks from Ravitch for an absence of any kind of any interesting detail in favor of a superficial, boring overview than can go from 1000 B.C. to the present in 1,000 pages.
Ravitch cites statistics showing that more than half of the nation's high school seniors scored as low as you can go in history exams.
She said it could be because the textbooks are so dull, or because so many of their teachers never studied history and can't argue with the textbooks' "smug certainty."
'Scam'
"Or maybe it is because, with the teen-agers' usual ability to spot a scam, they know that much of what is taught to them is phony and isn't worth remembering," she said.
Textbooks on English literature don't fare any better. "Today's literature textbooks reflect the state of the field of English language arts: large, beautifully packaged and incoherent," she wrote.
She said the books were littered with non-literary features such as an essay about homelessness or air pollution.
"So long as curriculum experts continue to believe that young people should read only about themselves and should not be expected to reach beyond their own experiences, the literature prized by generations of Americans of all races and conditions does not stand a chance," she said.
Ravitch points out that the censorship of tests and textbooks is surrounded by the free-wheeling popular culture. This nullifies the effect of the efforts of the publishers.
She said children were influenced not only by what they read in their textbooks and what they face on tests, but by family, friends, community, religion, television, radio, music, movies and every other part of the American experience.
"Much as the censors hope to limit what children see and hear, they do not have the means to do it," she said.
Solutions
Ravitch said there were three ways to stop the censorship. The first would be to stop the practice by several states, led by Texas and California, of adopting, or choosing, text books for all the school districts in the state.
The second is sunshine: public knowledge that this is going on.
"The public needs to know what the publishers, the states and the federal government are doing to educational materials," she wrote.
The third way would be to improve teacher education, particularly in their subject areas.
"In a perfect world, teachers would be so well educated that they wouldn't rely on textbooks," she wrote.
The world isn't perfect, so Ravitch is trying to make it a little better.
Copyright 2003 by United Press International.
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