Books and
Cooks West
February 2005
The Language Police
by Diane Ravitch
The Language Police: How
Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
Diane Ravitch
Jared and Dawn's place
Saturday, February 19 at 5:30 PM
Lentil & brown rice stew, salad, brown rice with vegetables,
focaccio bread, zinfadel, cheesecake
Our rating: 3.3 cups of tea!
From Amazon.com
The impulse in the 1960s and ‘70s to achieve fairness and a balanced
perspective in our nation’s textbooks and standardized exams was
undeniably necessary and commendable. Then how could it have gone so
terribly wrong? Acclaimed education historian Diane Ravitch answers
this question in her informative and alarming book, The Language
Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Author
of 7
books, Ravitch served as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education from
1991 to 1993. Her expertise and her 30-year commitment to education
lend authority and urgency to this important book, which describes in
copious detail how pressure groups from the political right and left
have wrested control of the language and content of textbooks and
standardized exams, often at the expense of the truth (in the case of
history), of literary quality (in the case of literature), and of
education in general. Like most people involved in education, Ravitch
did not realize "that educational materials are now governed by an
intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be
considered controversial or offensive." In this clear-eyed critique,
she is an unapologetic challenger of the ridiculous and damaging
extremes to which bias guidelines and sensitivity training have been
taken by the federal government, the states, and textbook publishers.
In a multi-page sampling of rejected test passages, we discover that
"in the new meaning of bias, it its considered biased to acknowledge
that lack of sight is a disability," that children who live in urban
areas cannot understand passages about the country, that the Aesop
fable about a vain (female) fox and a flattering (male) crow promotes
gender bias. As outrageous as many of the examples are, they do not
appear particularly dangerous. However, as the illustrations of
abridgment, expurgation, and bowdlerization mount, the reader begins to
understand that our educational system is indeed facing a monumental
crisis of distortion and censorship. Ravitich ends her book with three
suggestions of how to counter this disturbing tendency. Sadly, however,
in the face of the overwhelming tide of misinformation that has already
been entrenched in the system, her suggestions provide cold comfort.
--Silvana Tropea
