Posted on 05/06/2003 7:46:21 AM PDT by ZGuy
The classic children's story The Little Engine That Could has been banned in some U.S. jurisdictions because the train is male and The Friendly Dolphin rejected because it discriminates against students not living near the sea, according to a major study on education policy.
The study found officials who approve classroom materials want references to dinosaurs removed, because they prompt questions about evolution, and owls stricken as they are taboo for Navajo Indians.
Ketchup and french fries, bacon and eggs and ice cream and cake are also on the outs because of concerns over healthy eating habits.
Even birthday parties have been forbidden because they could upset children who do not get invited to them, says Dr. Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.
Dr. Ravitch studied education policy in the United States for three years, tracking policies of state authorities and local school boards, test-writing companies, review committee decisions, as well as in-house correspondence and style guides of publishing houses -- much of which was deemed secret and came to light only through court action.
She documents "an elaborate, well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and broadly implemented by textbook publishers, testing agencies, states, and the federal government."
"Educational materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive," she writes. "Some of this censorship is trivia, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school."
Censorship has become so entrenched that reworked titles are making their way into Canadian classrooms, Dr. Ravitch said yesterday.
"You will be encountering this if you are using the textbooks developed by any of the major publishers, and yes, Canada would be largely using the same books. The trend is spreading," she said.
Publishers are so fearful of their titles being blacklisted by major education authorities they voluntarily remove anything that could conceivably cause offence -- making classrooms an "empire of boredom" for young readers, who are forced to read nothing but "pap," Dr. Ravitch said.
Changes made to books and test questions, as documented by Dr. Ravitch, include:
- Women are not portrayed as caregivers or as doing housework and men cannot be professionals such as lawyers, doctors or plumbers;
- Elderly people must be active and not feeble;
- Regional bias is to be stricken -- for instance a story of a mountain climber would discriminate against students who live in flat areas;
- Girls cannot be depicted as watching sports, they must be playing them;
- Children cannot be portrayed as questioning authority or being in conflict with adults;
- Characters must not be orphans, ghosts or animals with negative or dirty associations, such as mice, bugs or scorpions;
- Ethnic stereotypes must not be propagated, so people with Irish roots cannot be police officers and a black person cannot be an accomplished athlete.
In an interview, Dr. Ravitch -- a professor at New York University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former education advisor for both Republican and Democrat presidents -- said the result is harmful to children.
"It bores the tears out of them and makes them cynical," she said. "The things around them are far more interesting than what they are finding in the classroom. The books can't portray what the children see before them with their own eyes so they dislike reading.
"The first requirement of good writing and good history is accuracy," she said.
"The bias and sensitivity reviewers work with assumptions that have the inevitable effect of stripping away everything that is potentially thought-provoking and colorful from the texts that children encounter."
The pressure on officials and publishers come from both the left and right of the political spectrum, Dr. Ravitch said.
The revision of materials started as a way of rooting out truly offensive material. Then politics entered the fray in earnest: While the left was ripping out material considered insensitive to multiculturalism or gender equality, the right was stripping out material deemed anti-family or pro-sex, she said.
The solution, she said, is to remove state and school board control of approved reading lists and trust teachers to select material appropriate for their specific classes.
Last month, an elementary workbook was removed from primary schools because it said Inuit people collect welfare and lack the skills to hold permanent jobs and that their traditional way of life was "no longer the right way to live."
Parent of pupils at an Iqaluit school complained about the references in Let's Visit Nunavut, a workbook produced by S&S Learning Materials, based in Napanee, Ont.
Ethnic stereotypes must not be propagated, so people with Irish roots cannot be police officers and a black person cannot be an accomplished athlete.
Michael Jordan's gonna take that kinda hard...
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