book review, Volume 6 number 2, February 2004 You Can’t Say That! The Language Police “Censorship in this country is widespread, subtle, and surprising. It is not inflicted on us by the government. It need not be. We inflict it on ourselves.” Censorship, most of us would agree, is un-American. Few things frighten Americans more than an all-powerful state dictating what we can and can not read, let alone think. We like to believe that such practices are non-existent in this country. Yet, thanks to a lengthy and largely covert process censorship has become the rule in the world of public school textbooks. State boards of education have had a hand in it, but the censorship is ultimately self-enforced by publishers who, after decades of contentious challenges from ideological groups of all stripes, have become expert at avoiding controversy by removing any potentially provocative material from their books long before they are published. Tests and textbooks are vetted by sensitivity committees and subjected to stringent language and topic restrictions using standards that publishers are reluctant at best to make public. This is the story education historian Diane Ravitch lays out in The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Anyone who still thinks that children’s schoolbooks are the result of extensive research into the educational process better think again. Textbooks and tests are produced with the primary goal of not offending anyone—particularly not political activists. The textbook industry has failed to defend the importance of introducing children to a wide range of ideas and teaching them to be discriminating thinkers; rather, it has chosen to do everything in its power to kowtow to even the pettiest of demands by parents and pressure groups. The results would often be comical were the stories not true. Ravitch tells of one test in which a question about a blind mountain climber who ascended Mt. McKinley was deleted by a sensitivity board. The purported reason was that the story implied that blindness created unique obstacles for mountain climbing, a notion that apparently discriminates against the blind. Several publishers have banned the word “statesman” from their books, proclaiming it sexist. Suggested alternatives include “diplomat,” legislator” and “public servant,” none of which comes close to the meaning of statesman. Stereotypes of boys’ behavior to be avoided include brutishness, violence, crudity, harshness and insensitivity. Nor can boys be presented as quiet and easygoing. One wonders just what traits boys are allowed to display. The New York State Education Department dropped all references to Jews in prewar Poland from a passage from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s In My Father’s Court, completely robbing the story of its context (and begging the question: if it has become impolitic to mention the presence of Jews in Poland prior to 1939, how do we explain to our children the absence of Jews from that nation by 1945?). If this sounds like political correctness gone berserk, then note that such subjects as divorce, death, delinquency and abortion are also taboo, thanks to fundamentalist Christians. So are magic and fantasy (the Harry Potter series is perpetually being challenged by evangelicals). And don’t even think of mentioning evolution outside of science classes. And there it can only be taught as “theory,” despite being the underlying principle of biology. The problem, as Ravitch tells it, is the nature of the schoolbook market. California and Texas are the two largest markets for textbooks, and both states buy most of the books for their local schools. This means statewide committees are appointed that select textbooks, and that are heavily influenced through the public hearing process by the most vocal pressure groups. In Texas this means the fundamentalist right, while in California it’s the multiculturalist left. Since publishers can’t afford to be excluded from these markets, they end up bending over backwards to avoid anything that might raise alarm bells in either state. It’s all part of the ongoing culture war between the right, which believes in a past that never actually existed, and the left, which believes in a future that will never come to pass. Both sides believe that children will act on what they read and that if this can be controlled, so too can the children. And thus will the future be made better. This, of course, overlooks the existence of television, radio, movies, and the Internet, which continuously expose kids to plenty of offensive ideas. (Ravitch gives kids credit for generally being smarter than their politically driven parents and seeing through the wool that grownups are futilely attempting to pull over their eyes.) But on the schoolbook front it’s a victory for political activists on both the left and the right, with children the losers. Ravitch says, “With everything that might offend anyone removed, the textbooks lacked the capacity to inspire, sadden, or intrigue their readers. Such are the wages of censorship.” Children, then, aren’t giving up on reading because they’ve been dummied down by television; they’ve quit reading because they’re treated like dummies by their schoolbooks. The books are boring as hell. They have no relevance to their target audience. But then, kids aren’t the target market, their uptight parents are. What began as a much needed effort to remove sexist and racist language from current texts has degenerated into an unceasing drive to ensure that no one’s feelings are ever hurt in the least, leaving our kids the victims of language police banality.
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