A leading historian of education offers a chilling picture of textbook publishers, test writers, and sensitivity committees.

THE LANGUAGE POLICE
How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
Diane Ravitch
New York: Knopf, 2003
272 pp., $24.00

ookworm. Cover girl. Snowman! These words strike terror in the hearts of politically correct textbook publishers, who replace such damaging diction with bland, "gender-neutral" terms such as intellectual, model, and snowperson. Also banned are yachts (elitist), Mount Rushmore (offensive to Lakota Indians), and mountains (disconcerting to flatlanders).
        In The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, Diane Ravitch offers a chilling picture of the Newspeak demanded by textbook publishers, test writers, and state and federal bias and sensitivity committees. These eliminate every word, phrase, or idea that challenges their vision of an ideal world, in which girls are unconcerned about their physical appearance, boys are passive and nurturing, and no one celebrates Christmas. Ravitch, a historian of education, served during the first Bush administration as assistant secretary in charge of research in the U.S. Department of Education. She is currently Research Professor of Education at New York University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
        Today's language police--the members of bias and sensitivity committees who serve as censors of educational materials such as textbooks and standardized texts--have their origin in the 1960s. However, back in those more innocent times, when feminists quaintly burned their bras and scolded any man who dared "condescend" to them by opening a door for them, the then new, politically correct adjustments to our language seemed silly and comical. When a cigar-chomping comic in a plaid suit joked about manhole covers becoming "personhole" covers and history becoming "herstory," most people politely laughed after the punchline-popping rim shot. How absurd the politically correct word games seemed. Surely this fad would fade away, just as bell-bottoms and granny glasses disappeared into thrift shops and attics.
        It didn't. Humor didn't disarm the language police, who, lacking a sense of humor, are incapable of recognizing why they are ridiculous. Herstory, for example, actually became a word in academic circles; a Google search of this term pulls up over fifty-one thousand hits.
        Why are the language police so eager to wage war on words? It's because they see this war as a means to power. Control the words people use, and you influence the way they think. While the avowed target is "bias" or "insensitivity," the greater objective is incorrect thought.

The Furies of sensitivity

        The lengths to which the language police are willing to go to eradicate such thought are chilling. Pursuing bias relentlessly, the Furies of sensitivity are unencumbered by any reservation regarding whether it is right for them to revise history or to constrict thought to conform to their own wishes and interests--wishes and interests that often run counter to those of ordinary Americans. The censors take a commonsensical idea--for example, that women shouldn't always be depicted as wives and mothers--and radicalize it into never showing women in traditional roles. The language police forbid the word mothering, lest this suggest men are not nurturing. The censors' demands are also often contradictory: a male mustn't be deemed either manly or womanish; a female shouldn't be called either a lady or a tomboy.
        The ever-expanding empire of the bias and sensitivity police includes more than purported gender bias. The word old, for example, they deem demeaning. The Sensitivity and Bias Review of New York State

Assessment (Albany, 2000), a document presenting New York State sensitivity guidelines, derides old as "an adjective that implies helplessness, dependency, or other negative conceptions." Houghton-Mifflin demands that old be botoxed into the vague "persons who are older," which begs the impolite question, older than what? the national average? the oldest member of the Bias and Sensitivity committee? dirt? The term minority group is an "offensive reference to cultural differences," for it suggests that minorities are in, well, the minority. Although the Japanese proudly consider themselves eastern--from the Land of the Rising Sun (remember that World War II flag?)--don't call them "Oriental," for this is Eurocentric, and one should have no center in the happy world of cultural equivalence. (One wonders whether the language police would object to a Tokyo resident's using the term Occidental?)
        Voracious in their appetite for exposing linguistic evildoing, the language police search and seize not just words but phrases and usages, and the historical or philosophical truths these reflect. Good-bye, "great men in history": henceforth, there are only "people who made history." The Founding Fathers must be rechristened (whoops! renamed) the framers. No more Mother Russia ("replace with 'Russia, land of rich harvests,' " which, given Russia's reliance on American wheat imports, also reflects textbook writers' ignorance of the realities of economics and history). In the unlikely event logical reasoning is taught, don't bother looking for "straw man" arguments; you are permitted to find only "unreal issues."
        Stereotyped images regarding occupations, emotions, and activities are to be avoided, even if they reflect obvious truth. Don't depict Mother vacuuming, cooking, or cleaning, despite feminists' complaints in other contexts that women still perform the vast majority of household tasks. A woman is never to be portrayed as a nurse, a mother, a secretary, or--with consummate insensitivity, given that the book is to be used by teachers--as a teacher.
        Even stereotypes a normal person would consider positive or just neutral are verboten. Boys are not to be depicted as "curious, ingenious, [or] able to overcome obstacles," nor as "intelligent, logical, [or] mechanical" (though all these positive traits may be assigned to girls). Don't allow an Asian-American student to be depicted as a valedictorian. Don't show an African-American woman as a "powerful 'black matriarch' " (an absurd prohibition eliminating much first-rate African-American literature). Jews can no longer be depicted as doctors, dentists, or lawyers.
        During the Iraq war, patriotic Americans were mocked for renaming french fries "freedom fries." The language police want to go even further. With the micromanagement typical of nanny-state advocates, the censors ban the mention of many foods. Lose any allusion to bacon, lest its presence offend Muslims. Other troublesome items are butter, sour cream, cream cheese (clearly, the dairy industry needs to start lobbying textbook publishers), candy, coffee, tea, corn chips, soda pop, potato chips, and pretzels. Ketchup, pickles, and mayonnaise are also banned for being nutritionally incorrect.

Tampering with textbooks

        More serious is the prohibition of entire topics. Textbooks are directed to avoid depicting conflicts with parents (good-bye, Pride and Prejudice) or with the law (ta-ta, Robin Hood); crime (arrividerci, Dostoevsky); ethnic groups in desperate situations (lck up Anne Frank's Diary); slavery (sorry, Miss Tubman); suicide (auf Wiedersehen, Romeo and Juliet), or physical violence (we can now only irritate a Mockingbird).
         Ravitch argues that censorship comes from both the Left and the Right. Her chapter on censorship by the Right, however, focuses largely on the past, and her long lists of forbidden words and ideas offer very few examples coming from the Right (e.g., the reluctance to mention dinosaurs, lest creationists be offended). The preponderance of her evidence makes it unmistakably clear that the most vigorous forces of censorship today reflect the multicultarist, antireligious agenda on the left.
        Once, school textbooks focused on communicating factual, useful information about mathematics, literature, history, and science. Now, however, their purpose is not informational, but ideological.

Diane Ravitch

Thus, according to Ravitch, in mathematics, "what matters most is not whether textbooks effectively teach mathematics, but whether they incorporate multicultural themes and biographies into the math curriculum." Similarly, Ravitch tells us, science textbooks must "point out the scientific contributions that Europeans falsely claimed as their own. There is no recognition that scientific principles are the same in every culture, regardless of 'who did it first.' "
        Ravitch asserts that even illustrations must advance the censors' agenda: "When illustrators show historical events where women were not full participants, they must include a caption that calls attention to this inequity; for example a picture of men lined up to vote in the nineteenth century would be accompanied by a caption that said: 'The right to participate in the electoral process was restricted to men until the success of the women's suffrage movement in 1920.' "
        The caption is not, however, required to state that neither men nor women voted in Asia, Africa, or in any number of nondemocratic countries elsewhere in the world during the nineteenth century. No harsh truth is to be avoided when it comes to European Americans--and no harsh truth is be acknowledged when it comes to any other people. Bigotry is depicted not as a human evil but as a European one.
        Most parents assume that textbooks reflect the best thought by the foremost authorities in any given field. They are wrong.
        Textbooks are composed not by individuals but by committees and consultants more race-conscious than the imperial wizard of a Ku Klux Klan chapter. The skin color of an author trumps every other qualification. As Ravitch tells us, "Editors are directed to seek out selections by authors who are of the same ethnic group they are describing." The bias guidelines for Scott-Foresman--Addison-Wesley fill 161 pages, in which people are presented not as individuals but, consistent with identity politics, as representing groups. Even worse than this oppressive race consciousness is its crudity. The bias and sensitivity consultants who determine both language and content typically have little or no expertise in the subject area they are scrutinizing.
        By changing the language and censoring thought, the language police hope to control children's thoughts and thus, eventually, society as a whole. "The goal of the language police is not just to stop us from using objectionable words but to stop us from having objectionable thoughts," says Ravitch. "The language police believe that reality follows language usage. If they can stop people from ever seeing offensive words and ideas, they can prevent them from having the thought or committing the act that the words signify." This attitude is reminiscent of those Victorians who struck leg from print or speech, in an effort to promote chastity. Similarly, the censorship of the language police ignores a fundamental truth--the phoniness of the textbook never-never land they construct is readily apparent to children, who live in the complex and troubling real world. As Ravitch observes, "The guideline writers seem to assume that children have never seen a newscast, never seen MTV, never seen anything on television or in the movies that violated the rules of this perfect, if boring, world."

Transforming history and literature

        One of the marks of a second-rate mind is a lack of flexibility; such an intellect sees the world through the tiny peephole of its own preexisting opinions. Rather than encourage students to enter imaginatively into worlds unlike their own, the language police have transformed the study of literature and history into a forced march toward their political and social goals. Textbooks no longer focus on aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual inquiry but treat great literature reductively, as works not of imagination but as mere political or social treatises.
        The sensitivity police are also at work eradicating "bias" from standardized tests. Ravitch explains how, for test publishers like Riverside (which produces the famous Iowa Test of Basic Skills), a potential test item is discarded as biased if it "might cause any student to be distracted or upset." The key words here are "might cause," not "will probably cause," and "any student," not the "typical student." Sensitivity pressure groups screen exams with the apparent assumption of widespread and extreme emotional fragility on the part of students. Examples of "negative material" that prevents children from performing on exams include any mention of arguing parents, badly behaving children, or troubling events such as fires, floods, and firings from jobs.
        It is nearly miraculous that tests are written at all, given the constraints upon standardized testing by the language police. According to Ravitch, "Test developers are told to avoid value judgments

that favor the society in which we live; to avoid controversial or sensitive topics; to be wary of passages written before 1970; to omit references to any specific region; to keep all questions as neutral and minimalist as possible, and to insert positive material about minorities, the aged, the handicapped, women, and other groups into test questions, regardless of its relevance to the subject being assessed."
        One might assume that extensive research has been done demonstrating that the items to be excluded have actually been shown to prevent children from performing well, but this is not the case. What we have is, at best, guesswork on the part of the sensitivity fascists.
        An especially insidious tactic employed by the language police is silent editing, a technique taken to new heights of offensiveness by New York State Regents exam officials. Exam writers wanted to quote Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's observation that "man, who was created in God's image, wants to be free as God is free: free to choose between good and evil, love and vengeance, life and death." The exam officials decided it was necessary to carefully excise Wiesel's Jewish faith, lest others find it offensive. Wiesel's statement, sanitized from any appearance of religious faith, appeared on the Regents language arts exam as "Man wants to be free: free to choose between good and evil, love and vengeance, life and death." Wiesel is not the only victim of brutality at the hands of the language police. Perfectly good stories are often rewritten by the censors to meet multicultural goals. Thus, the editors of Holt's high school textbook Concepts in Literature changed Judy Blume's "Freddie in the Middle" into "Maggie in the Middle," and, for good measure, transformed Mrs. Jay into Mrs. Chang.
        The language police feel free to change literature to suit their will, for to them literature is nothing but a propaganda tool to promote their agendas. They pretend that there is no such thing as a great literary tradition and discourage teaching children how to make aesthetic judgments. Students are instructed to seek narcissistically their own reflection in what they read, with a reductivistic interpretation of reader-response theory offered as justification. For the language police, literature textbooks are a slightly more sophisticated version of the computer-generated storybooks well-meaning grandparents buy toddlers, in which the child's name and salient details of his life are inserted into the story to encourage the tot's interest: "Then Jeremy told Santa he hoped that there would be a puppy under the Christmas tree at 27 Willowtree Lane." Textbooks encourage students to evaluate literature only according to the subjective and quasi-therapeutic criteria of how a work makes them "feel."
        Subjecting children to bad literature textbooks is unfortunate. Subjecting them to bad history textbooks, however, has even greater consequences. Rearing citizens who neither understand nor value American history imperils the nation.
        More than in other disciplines, history teachers rely on textbooks for their classroom presentations. According to Ravitch, "Most teachers of history in grades 7-12 have neither a major nor a minor in history; instead they have a degree in social studies education, some other branch of pedagogy, a social science , or a completely unreleated field. Even those who do have a major or minor in history are unlikely to have a solid knowledge of every aspect of American or world history. Consequently, most lteachers in this incredibly broad subject must rely of necessity on their textbooks to supply the organization and basic information for the course." Because of this lack of background in the field, even the best-intended teachers may be unaware how selective and biased textbooks are, and trust the textbook authors and editors to know better than they.
        Such trust is sadly misplaced. Rather than be introduced to history, students are subjected to false cultural equivalence. No one civilization is to be considered superior to any other--a shocking assertion, given the varying levels of economic opportunity, degrees of individual freedom, and treatment of women across cultures. Textbook writers present the shortcomings of Christian Europe with vigor but are resolutely blind to the failings of non-Western cultures--or, as Ravitch succinctly puts it: "Christian Europe invades; Islam spreads." Horrors such as Aztec human sacrifice are presented as just part of an alternative belief system. Murderous dictators like Mao are lauded for their efforts at "education," reflecting the censors' ignorance of the particularly horrible fate of teachers at the hands of the Red Guard. World War II is presented in terms of the struggle for women's rights at home rather than as a war against fascism abroad.
        No longer do history textbooks present history in coherent, sequential narratives. Rather, what is taught are "themes," such as "oppression," in broad, superficial clumps that conceal historical causality and make it easier to promote the censors' multiculturalist agenda. American nationalism is discarded contemptuously and replaced with globalism. Students reading these textbooks come away with little understanding of the moral (much less the capitalist) foundations of democracy and are ill equipped to respond intelligently to present or future crises.

Ravitch's recommendations

        Through their quarter-century of effort, the censors have produced an education establishment that, at all levels, punishes those with traditional values or who question their authority. What is rewarded is cringing compliance--the very antithesis of what education should be about. It should go without saying that it is wrong for teachers and textbooks to compel students to mirror their agenda.
        Even for those who share the censors' views, the bias and sensitivity criteria are problematical, for the definition of bias is simultaneously too broad and too proscriptive. It is extremely difficult to write something that cannot be criticized by the language police. Consider, for example, violence. When practiced by men in the American military, violence is often bad; violence in the name of Mao or Quetzalcoatl or the United Mine Workers union, however, is excusable, even laudable. Indeed, almost every kind of behavior is criticized, unless expressed in a way they find appropriate and in terms of their choosing. What this tells us is that the actual goal of the language police is not the cultivation of virtue so much as the exercise of power.
        How, then, do we take power away from the language police, and return it to the hands of teachers and parents?
        Ravitch explains that textbooks are chosen by state school systems, which buy in enormous quantities. Consequently, textbook publishers don't need to please parents or teachers but state education agencies--specifically, the agencies' bias and sensitivity committees. In trying to satisfy the demands of the marketplace, textbook publishers strive to omit anything remotely controversial that might negatively impact sales. They thus produce as bland a product as possible.
        Textbook authors are also releuctant to incur the wrath of bias and sensitivity extremists. Because the largest textbook orders are placed by Texas and California, textbooks are tailored to meet the demands of pressure groups in those states.
        Right now, pressure groups need target only four publishing houses to dominate the entire textbook market for millions of teachers. Because publishers use nearly identical bias and sensitivity guidelines, there is little difference among their products. Teachers and schools currently have little real choice among textbooks, no matter how frustrated they are with the miserable offerings before them. Thus, Ravitch recommends that textbooks be chosen not at the state level but at the school district level, the better to address local needs. These needs may well be better met with trade paperbacks--biographies, histories, literary anthologies--and/or computer software.
        Ravitch also suggests that textbook publishers be compelled to publish their bias guidelines and the credentials of those they hire as sensitivity consultants. The same should hold true for those producing state examinations. Exam writers, she argues, should be compelled to disclose what items have been excluded from examinations on the grounds of bias and sensitivity, and the basis for the exclusion. As Ravitch points out, "If questions about geometry are excluded, for example, because blind children can't answer them, then the public should be told."
        Most importantly, Ravitch emphasizes teachers should have significant expertise in the fields they teach, so they can recognize and correct the shortcomings of any text. This is the best defense against those who would ban words and distort truth.
        The language police seek to eliminate anything that might cause students discomfort or distress. The world is, however, a difficult and trying place, full of ideas that must be resisted and fought. What students need to learn are courage and perseverance in the face of difficulty, so that they can confront what should be resisted--including censorship by the language police.

Laurie Morrow, a former Salvatori Fellow of the Heritage Foundation and professor of English, hosts the radio show True North with Laurie Morrow, airing in Burlington, Vermont. Edward Morrow is the author and illustrator of numerous books, most recently The Halloween Handbook (Citadel Press, 2001).