Posted on 06/24/2003 12:56:53 AM PDT by kattracks
Political correctness has so infected the public schools that classroom textbooks are now vetted for bad words and phrases that may upset people.
Lou Dobbs reported Monday night on his CNN program that "the list of words and phrases now banned in American classrooms is rising at an alarming rate."
"You may be surprised" to find out the innocent words and phrases now being deemed inadmissible in a classroom, Dobbs said.
Dobbs' launch pad was author and education expert Diane Ravitch's new book, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."
Here are some examples from Ravitch's work:
- "Anchorman" is a no go. Sorry, Lou, it's sexist!
- Forget about mentioning "Adam and Eve." The PC crowd says it should be "Eve and Adam to demonstrate males do not take priority over females."
- "Abnormal. Banned as demeaning to persons with disabilities."
Ravitch says the thought police at schoolbook publishers even issue "bias guidelines" to enforce their edicts.
Textbooks have been disinfected of such words as "actress or businessman or salesman, or founding fathers or brotherhood."
Ravitch explains that banned words and phrases are removed because, as the p.c. crowd argues, "these are either sexist words or age-biased words, or someone will find them offensive."
The thought police, according to Ravitch, have also been busy "rewriting classic literature, dropping phrases and words because there were words like 'God' that weren't allowed, even though it appeared in the works of Eli Wiesel, or Isaac Bashevis Singer."
One explanation for the growing censorship in the schoolbook publishing market: four publishing companies dominate 75 percent of the market.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Media Bias
Bridge to Terabithia? What the heck for?
Pure BS. Not available in some public libraries does not mean "banned" :).
Whether or not my kids read any of these books is my decision, and with the exception of only two or three obvious titles I would let my kids read any of these and be thrilled that they were reading books.
Some may contain foul language or may be un-P.C., but hopefully my kids will be mature enough to handle it.
Recently, I had a brief conversation with a male child (is it still OK to say "boy"?), maybe 10 or 11. He had seen a book with the word "Jew" in the title. He freaked out and immediately proclaimed the book to be "racist". I pointed out to him that it could not be, because the author was a Rabbi. I got nothing from him but a blank expression which said he didn't know what a Rabbi is, and didn't need to.
So, this is the new generation.
I don't know why each of these books is controversial. But a quick search about this one reveals that it's troubled in a particular location, and the issue seems to be the occult. There's a brief blurb at freedomforum.org claiming that references to witchcraft are to blame.
It makes sense that some parents wouldn't want their kids to read this book. I think that is true for almost any book, at one time or another, though. I see this issue as being part of the conundrum that is public education today. I'm sure that private schools are selective about what they acquire for their libraries.
But it also wouldn't surprise me if private schools have an even wider variety of books than many public schools do. There is no substitute for having an adult on hand to act as a moral compass for any serious young reader.
Bridge to Terabithia, the Newbery Award-winning book by Katherine Paterson has been challenged numerous times in Georgia school and public libraries.
Diane Ravitch points out in her new book The Language Police that both the left and the right put pressure on textbook publishers to "cleanup" offensive language, and the result is tripe. Here are some comments about the book and the author.
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Before Anton Chekhov and Mark Twain can be used in school readers and exams, they must be vetted by a bias and sensitivity committee. An anthology used in Tennessee schools changed By God! to By gum! and My God! to You dont mean it. The New York State Education Department omitted mentioning Jews in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story about prewar Poland, or blacks in Annie Dillards memoir of growing up in a racially mixed town. California rejected a reading book because The Little Engine That Could was male. Diane Ravitch maintains that Americas students are compelled to read insipid texts that have been censored and bowdlerized, issued by publishers who willingly cut controversial material from their booksa case of the bland leading the bland. The Language Police is the first full-scale expos of this cultural and educational scandal, written by a leading historian. It documents the existence of an elaborate and well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and implemented by test makers and textbook publishers, states, and the federal government. School boards and bias and sensitivity committees review, abridge, and modify texts to delete potentially offensive words, topics, and imagery. Publishers practice self-censorship to sell books in big states. To what exactly do the censors object? A typical publishers guideline advises that
Ravitch offers a powerful political and economic analysis of the causes of censorship. She has practical and sensible solutions for ending it, which will improve the quality of books for students as well as liberating publishers, state boards of education, and schools from the grip of pressure groups. Passionate and polemical, The Language Police is a book for every educator, concerned parent, and engaged citizen. Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She was assistant secretary in charge of research in the U.S. Department of Education in the administration of President George H. W. Bush and was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board by President Bill Clinton. The author of seven previous books on education, including the critically acclaimed Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. |
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From The Critics | |
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The New York Times In The Language Police, Ms. Ravitch -- a historian of education at New York University and the author of Left Back, a 2000 book about failed school reform -- provides an impassioned examination of how right-wing and left-wing pressure groups have succeeded in sanitizing textbooks and tests, how educational publishers have conspired in this censorship, and how this development over the last three decades is eviscerating the teaching of literature and history. Michiku Kakutani The Los Angeles Times Lucid, forceful, written with insight, passion, compassion and conviction, The Language Police is not only hair-raisingly readable but deeply reasonable. It should be required reading not only for parents, teachers and educators, but for everyone who cares about history, literature, science, culture and indeed the civilization in which we live. Merle Rubin The Washington Post It's difficult to exaggerate the importance of this book. Whether The Language Police will turn out to be one of those rare books that actually influence the way we live -- Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed -- remains to be seen, but surely one must pray that it does. Meticulously researched and forcefully argued, it makes appallingly plain that the textbooks American schoolchildren read and the tests that measure their academic progress have been corrupted by a bizarre de facto alliance of the far left and the far right. Jonathan Yardley The New York Times Sunday Book Review Ravitch, finding the system and its results ''an outrage,'' passionately insists that ''the reign of censorship must end.'' Her remedies, along with better-educated teachers: Eliminate the statewide textbooks adoption process, and substitute a competitive market, with school districts choosing their own books and materials. And let the sun shine in by compelling all states and publishers to reveal their bias guidelines and by placing on the Internet all the deliberations of bias and sensitivity panels, including what they reject. ''No one asked the rest of us whether we want to live in a society in which everything objectionable to every contending party has been expunged from our reading materials,'' she notes. It's time, indeed, that we were asked. Daniel J. Kevles |
Diane Ravitch is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K12 Education.
Ravitch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she holds the Brown Chair in Education Policy. Additionally, she is a research professor at New York University and a member of the board of the New America Foundation.
Since 1997, Ravitch has been a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and the Society of American Historians.
During the first Bush administration, Ravitch served as an assistant secretary for educational research and improvement and as a counselor to the U.S. Department of Education. She is a former professor of history and education at Columbia University's Teachers College and a former adviser to Poland's Ministry of Education.
Ravitch is the editor of many publications, including the annual Brookings Papers on Education Policy. She edited The Schools We Deserve, Debating the Future of American Education, and The American Reader.
She has many books to her credit including The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms; National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide; What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (with Hoover senior fellow and Koret Task Force member Chester E. Finn Jr.); The Great School Wars: New York City, 18051973; and The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 19451980. Her publications have been translated into many languages. Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Brookings Review.
Ravitch, a historian of education, has lectured on democracy and civic education throughout the world. Her website is www.dianeravitch.com.
(2003)
But the more important consideration is that these generations will continuously be set upon from so many angles that are not presently exposed, in order to conform to conform to the citizen that is desired by the would be mind controllers.
A liberal education shows a person how he has been formed and provides the means to liberate himself from the conditions and presuppositions of his native environment through the examination of them. The critical examination is really a task of self-criticism, or self-knowledge, actually. This is what education is supposed to help a person achieve --for himself. This type of education is not pitched int order to meet the needs of industry, government or "society". Rather, it is addressed to the needs of the person. This is about his liberation or freedom. Such an education is a precious gift. This gift is not given by users for it tends to put the recipient beyond the use of others.
That achievement lasts forever. It is not a primer for "a job" and it is not "training". The latter are not liberating. They are intended as designs to be implanted on a blank slate in order to produce a "capability" for certain tasks. Those tasks are defined by others. The person is really left out of this kind of education except inthe forms of suppression that are felt necessary in order to achieve efficient "training".
The future will not even know what it lost, because it will not know what a liberal education was supposed to be.
Tyrants always proceed thus.
[Note: link this topic to the Gender Feminism article today by Wendy Mc_____ called Conscientious objector from the Gender War]
It's just so much liberal [explitive]. Labels divide people. We need fewer labels, not more. --George Carlin (?)
I fully agree with both of you! I don't know if this is really George Carlin, but it sure is funny: http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/1521/carlin_pclanguage2.html I won't repeat it here since it's not exactly according to FR's rules :)
Sigh. It probably has nothing whatsoever to do with "The Joneses" and "their Johnny".
A public library buys books with limited funds. Often the personal tastes of a librarian or group of them will matter for what is chosen. If I had been buying, I'd probably have included some of the books on your list (like Flowers for Algernon and Brave New World). I'd have dropped others, like the few homosexual activist tracts and The Handmaid's Tale which I found rather boring and stupid. And by dropping a few things I'd have money to buy other stuff, like for example "The Wasp Factory" and "Glass" by Iain Banks.
Unless you can point to some directive saying that these libraries will not get public funds unless they drop the books on your list, you have nothing here. Probably such a directive does not exist, since your list is not even consistent - these books are not missing from every public library, but are merely a collection of titles that someone has determined are often not to be found.
It's not my list, but I've seen a community divided by what should be read in just one 8th grade class. It's more than just economics and budgets. Check out Ravitch.
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