The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn

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 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 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 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

Publishers Weekly

Textbook publishers are guilty of self-censorship, argues Ravitch (Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform) in this polemical analysis of the anti-bias and sensitivity guidelines that govern much of today's educational publishing. Looking at lawsuits, school board hearings and private correspondence between textbook editors, Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University, shows how publishers are squeezed by pressure from groups on the right (which object to depictions of disobedience, family conflict, sexuality, evolution and the supernatural) and the left (which correct for the racism and sexism of older textbooks by urging stringent controls on language and images to weed out possibly offensive stereotypes)-most publishers have quietly adopted both sets of suggestions. In chapters devoted specifically to literature and history texts, Ravitch contends that these sanitized materials sacrifice literary quality and historical accuracy in order to escape controversy. She also discusses how current statewide textbook adoption methods have undermined competition and brought about the consolidation of the educational publishing industry, leading to more bland, simplistic fare. There is no shortage of colorful examples: a scientific passage about owls was rejected from a standardized test because the birds are taboo for Navajos; one set of stereotype guidelines urges writers to avoid depicting "children as healthy bundles of energy"; editors of a science textbook rejected a sentence about fossil fuels being the primary cause of global warming because "[w]e'd never be adopted in Texas." Readers will likely disagree about whether, on balance, anti-bias guidelines do more harm than good, but Ravitch's detailed, concise, impassioned argument raises crucial questions for parents and educators. Appendixes include "A Glossary of Banned Words, Usages, Stereotypes, and Topics" as well as a recommended reading list for students. Agents, Lynn Chu and Glen Hartley. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Children's Literature

Diane Ravitch issues a spooky wake-up call to parents and educators. In The Language Police, she explores the influence of conservative and liberal forces in this country on school textbooks. She maintains that textbook writers, editors and reviewers scrutinize these materials not just for racist and sexist language but for any potentially objectionable material. For example, to avoid occupational stereotyping, only women, not men, should be portrayed as lawyers and plumbers. Selections from great works of literature, including Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, are re-written. Ravitch challenges us to ask: How might these sanitized books, so different from the real world, affect youngsters' ability to reason and learn? 2003, Knopf, Ages 14 up.
—Mary Quattlebaum

KLIATT

Ravitch exposes bias among textbook publishers. This "huge scandal in American education" comes about in part because publishers do not want to offend states such as Florida, California, Texas, and New York, using the services of committees that search texts for biases of all kinds. As a result, texts have been expurgated of references to: sexual innuendo, the disabled, junk food, stereotyping of women (by showing them cooking, for example), scantily clad people, rainbows (gay agenda), age groups, religions, racial or ethnic groups, Satanism, rock and roll music, serious car accidents, parents quarreling, masks (tainted by association with Halloween), life on other planets (if the implication of evolution can be made), blizzards, hunting, gangs, ghosts, junk bonds, Christmas (or other religious holiday celebrations), abortion, farms, expensive gifts, bacon, alcoholic drinks, slaves, lying, divorce, Chief Sitting Bull (banned as a relic of colonialism; replaced with Totanka Iotanka), and corn chips. The list goes on. And it's not just textbooks that are being gutted. Tests are also carefully crafted to be inoffensive and unexciting. What to do? "When bias and sensitivity reviewers know that they can no longer censor and expurgate behind closed doors; when publishers must expect to sell their books to millions of individual teachers, not two or three powerful state school boards; when state school officials lose their power over the content of textbooks; when the public is informed about threats to intellectual freedom that is when the reign of the language police will end." Ravitch's book should be on the shelf of every public and school library in the country. KLIATT Codes:SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Random House, Vintage, 271p. notes. bibliog. index., Ages 15 to adult.
—Janet Julian

Library Journal

In this troubling account, Ravitch (education, NYU) explores a contentious topic: publishers succumbing to political interests and thus producing bland, geographically indistinguishable, and historically inaccurate textbooks and test questions for use in American schools. Ravitch recounts her own experiences as a member of a federal testing board charged with developing test questions for a standardized test. Because publishers are aware that legal challenges can hurt sales, they generally avoid anything that could be perceived as controversial. As a result, they rejected many of her selections for a variety of reasons, many of which are closely examined here. For instance, an encyclopedic passage about owls was said to reflect cultural bias (owls are taboo in Navajo culture), a story about dolphins drew complaints about regional bias (as children could not possibly imagine what it's like to live near an ocean from reading about it), and a story about pioneer quilt making by women was perceived as sexist (pioneer women should only be depicted plowing fields and chopping wood). Unlike librarians, who are familiar with self-censorship and the influence that large states have on textbook publishers, parents, educators, students, and the general public will find this detailed and highly readable analysis alarming. Recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.]-Mark Alan Williams, Library of Congress Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Johnny and Janie can't read, can't find the Pacific on a map, can't even think-all thanks to official censorship that "represents a systemic breakdown of our ability to educate the next generation." So argues conservative pundit and Bush I assistant secretary of education Ravitch (Left Back, 2000, etc.) in a hard-hitting attack on the educational establishment and the interest groups, left and right, that control it. It's not so much that youngsters today are coddled with sensitive textbook language that bars reference to Africans as slaves or Jews as classical musicians or that dances around the non-niceties of Islamic fundamentalism, though this sort of censorship is awful enough in Ravitch's estimation; it's that contending political groups, from the Christian right to gay and lesbian alliances, have so thoroughly inserted their agendas into the classroom that it's become practically impossible to depict anyone doing anything, whether it's George Washington crossing the Delaware or George Washington Carver finding economic uses for peanuts, without arousing someone's ire. The governing idea in the resulting content-free, actor-free, active-verb-free educational scene is that no one be offended by any idea he or she is ever exposed to in the classroom-European Americans excepted, Ravitch writes, for they "are the only group that must be taken down a few pegs; their self-esteem is too high." Battles over curriculum and textbooks are nothing new, of course, as Ravitch shows; still, those battles have become particularly bitter in just the last few years: school boards, educators, and textbook publishers have so utterly given in to political pressure that no opinion-and almost no piece ofliterature-can be aired in a venue that once prided itself as a forum for the free expression of ideas, and that can now no longer teach anything of real value. Ravitch's assault is far-reaching, admirably complete, and generally nondoctrinaire. She takes on ideologues of whatever stripe, finds them all wanting, and offers, in detail, a reasonable alternative in the form of a curriculum that explains that sometimes history hasn't been very nice while allowing historical actors to speak for themselves. Of tremendous importance to parents, educational reformers, and anyone concerned with the myriad failings of the present culture. Agents: Lynn Chu, Glen Hartley/Writers Representatives