Censors Everywhere

National Review, July 28, 2003 by Tracy Lee Simmons

The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, by Diane Ravitch (Knopf, 255 pp., $24)

It was one of the most delicious moments in the recent history of academic idiocy when, in 1982, the principal of the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax County, Virginia, tried to remove The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the school's library; a school administrator assaulted the book as "racist trash" for its showcasing of racial stereotypes, as well as for its use of the "N-word."

This kind of academic overreach has become quite common, and has been much commented upon. But Diane Ravitch has unearthed some far more methodical meddling in the academy than these sporadic effusions of the naive and righteous: She finds that the compilers of today's school textbooks and standardized tests are often less eager to inform and measure than to propagandize and distort -- and seek even to alter the very ways we communicate.

When she began work on what became The Language Police, she intended nothing more ample than a learned journal article of the kind that she, as a distinguished historian of education at New York University and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is eminently fit to write. But the banquet of nonsense served up by textbook publishers, and those who advise them, proved too bountiful for mere snacking. With the relentless accuracy of a detective, she has traced the insidious ways in which politically correct assumptions have become endemic and all but irresistible, and in doing so she has traced a major source of rot in the schools and our culture. This book should sound alarms to all who have anything to do with teaching children, as it reveals just how deeply -- and systematically -- non-thought has seeped into the American mind.

Ravitch's welcome brand of scholarly common sense comes to us well recommended. Having served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Education under the first President Bush, she was also nominated by President Clinton to the National Assessment Governing Board, which is charged with guiding national testing -- and it is this appointment, and the professional encounters it brought, that led to this book. Hers is a trustworthy, non-partisan voice. All the better, then, that someone of her stature has come forward with such a study.

This book describes more or less official, or officially sponsored, censorship, mainly in the contentious fields of literature and history. We're well familiar with the typical methods the official classes use to enforce their jackbooted version of reality, and Ravitch doesn't shortchange them. Throughout both textbooks and tests, students of all ages are to be protected from anything offensive, unseemly, or even real. This is not always the worst possible impulse; younger children especially may need graduated exposure to unpleasant things. But insuperable problems can arise when bureaucrats -- committee drones least qualified to make subtler judgments -- change the words, and then the very nature, of their material. To protect themselves from controversy and low adoption rates by school districts, textbook and test publishers now routinely hire "sensitivity reviewers" -- a nicely Orwellian name for gatekeepers, who censor offensive material. Unfortunately, though, "offensive" is becoming an umbrella word with astonishingly wide coverage. Ravitch supplies us with an exhaustive list of both old and new prohibitions.

She wisely distinguishes between the wills to censor: Those of the Right are different from those of the Left. The worries of the Right are usually moral. These may be sound in themselves (and "selection is not censorship," she rightly reminds us), but highly charged moral concerns, when abused, can cause good and great literature to become a pawn in the hands of the shallow and unreflective. The censorship of the Left, though, is far worse, mostly because it springs from more broadly political and multicultural fantasies.

It's one thing to object to crass violence or explicit sexuality; what should surprise, and even shock, us laymen are the new categories being established of forbidden words and images. Some of these are garden variety: We must seek "fairness" and "diversity" in all things. We must make no arbitrary or disparaging distinctions of sex, such as actress, coed, dame. (Aviatrix is a real loss.) Whenever possible, Adam and Eve should be reversed to Eve and Adam so as to give priority to the female. Textbooks must also avoid the use of any feminine pronoun when referring to countries, boats, and ships. (Indeed we are to spare no pains in cauterizing the poetry from our language.) Bookworm and egghead are now considered demeaning: we're to replace both with intellectual, which really is demeaning. Dogma is to be banned as "ethnocentric" in favor of doctrine or belief. (Fanatic is also "ethnocentric," as is nearly every other historically useful word.) Even God is banned as potentially upsetting.