From the August issue of Resource Roundup…

The Language Police

   Several recent articles note that censorship of textbooks is contributing to ‘dumbing down’ and promoting uniformity of thought in our children. Arnold Beichman, Washington Times columnist, recently reviewed Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Ms. Ravitch, whom Beichman described as a ‘nationally renowned educator and historian’, said that she “stumbled upon an elaborate, well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and broadly implemented by test publishers, textbook publishers, states and the federal government... (E)ducational materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive. Some of this censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school... The guidelines ensure conformity of language and thought,” she wrote.

   The ultimate goal of the academic curriculum, says one publisher’s set of guidelines, is “to advance multiculturalism” (meaning that all cultures are good and equal -- except U.S. culture, which is usually depicted as inferior to all others --, and we must not only tolerate other cultures but embrace them -Ed.) The basic thrust of the guidelines, says Ms. Ravitch, is not to depict the world “as it is and as it was, but only as the guideline writers would like it to be.”

   Tests and textbooks are now censored by “bias and sensitivity review” panels, wrote Ms. Ravitch. For instance, a short biography of Gutzon Borglum, who designed the Mount Rushmore monument, is out. Why? Because the Lakota Indians, said the panel, consider the Black Hills a sacred place to pray and consider the sculpture “an abomination.” A passage about owls was eliminated from a proposed test because a panel member said that owls are taboo for the Navajos.

   California has a large school population and so carries a lot of clout with textbook publishers. California has told publishers not to include references in textbooks to “unhealthy” foods such as: french fries, coffee, bacon, butter, ketchup, and mayonnaise among others, wrote Ms. Ravitch.

   One guideline commands textbook authors to state that the U.S. was “patterned partially after the League of Five Nations, a union formed by five Iroquois nations.” Literary classics by William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and others are chopped up and made more ‘sensitive’ and less ‘offensive’. There is actually, in the 1993 guidelines prepared by McGraw Hill, “A Glossary of Banned Words, Usages, Stereotypes and Topics,” wrote Ms. Ravitch.

   Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer David McCullough told the Washington Times that elementary, middle and high school students are bored by dreadful history textbooks that embrace multiculturalism and cultural equivalence in order to be politically correct. And Arthur Spiegelman, reporting for the Reuters News Agency, wrote that in U.S. textbooks, the words ‘polo’ and ‘yacht’ are banned because they’re too elitist, ‘boyish figure’ is banned because it is sexist, and ‘blind’ and ‘bookworm’ are banned because they’re offensive. ‘God’ is also banned (too religious). Victoria Hughes, president of the Bill of Rights Institute, noted that one textbook spent “33 lines on George Washington and 10 pages on Bill Clinton”.

   (Washington, after all, was a slave owner, and such ‘evil’ people are being weeded out of our nation’s textbook history. Clinton, whose terms were marred by sleazy sexual and financial scandals and whose lack of response to terrorist attacks arguably led to the 9-11 tragedy, is somehow politically correct. Christianity and patriotism are not politically correct and are given short shrift, as are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Islam and environmentalism are, of course, politically correct.

   I was angered last year by a ‘special three-week geography course’ that my son’s class was studying. It taught that everything in the historic Muslim culture was warm and fuzzy and enlightened, and never mentioned persecution of Jews and Christians -- in fact, it taught that Muslims always tolerated other religions -- , subjugation of women, or barbaric punishments for crimes. I would also have been upset by a three-week course on Christianity that failed to mention the Inquisition -- but, of course, Christianity is not studied that extensively in our schools. According to the school, I was the only parent who objected to the biased, ‘everything and everyone is good and equal’ curriculum. -Ed. {Angie})    

Our Publik Skools

   “More and more often our modern schools are failing to even turn out readers, let alone scholars.”

(Columnist Linda Schrock Taylor, LewRockwell.com)