Genius Toiling in Obscurity

Yet Another Thing That's Wrong With Our Schools

The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch arrived at the circulation desk for me today. Six people are waiting in line behind me to read it; they will be happy to know they won't have to wait long for me to return this book to the library. It's a quick read, because its redundancies and excessive examples make it easy to skim huge sections of the book without missing anything important. Ravitch says early on that she meticulously researched it, and it looks to me like she included, in detail, everything she found. As a writing teacher, I am always reminding students that not everything they find in the research process will be relevant or useful in their final papers. Ravitch doesn't include anything patently irrelevant to her thesis, but every court case, every censorship battle, gets full treatment. Apparently she's never noticed that one extended example followed by a paragraph summarizing similar instances is sufficient. Either that, or she needed filler.

Some specific examples of redundancy: twice in the same chapter she explains the textbook adoption process that makes California and Texas so influential over textbook content nationwide. At least twice before I started skimming she names the four publishing companies that, in an age of merger and acquisition, dominate the textbook market. And whole chapters repeat and expand on points that were made perfectly adequately in the book's first chapter.

To prove that Ravitch could have said what she needed to say more briefly, I will summarize her main points:

• Textbooks are produced to be non-controversial; having learned the hard way through lawsuits that are expensive and damaging even when won, publishing companies carefully avoid including content that would be offensive to conservative religious groups on the right, and language that would be offensive to liberal multiculturalists on the left.
• Because it takes only a very small number of people to file an expensive lawsuit (Ravitch documents the influence that one Texas couple has over textbook content), both school districts and publishers remove or alter any material that is complained about by anyone. Publishers also subject their materials to pre-publication review by "representatives" of various groups and viewpoints in order to avoid costly controversy.
• Historically, at least some of what is excluded represents good ideas carried to extremes, though Ravitch does a poor job of drawing the line between useful anti-bias guidelines ("Make sure that not all women in the book are homemakers") and ridiculous ones ("No women can be portrayed as wives or mothers").
• States that adopt textbooks on a state-wide basis, especially California and Texas, represent such a huge segment of the textbook market that publishers cater to them, extending their influence nationwide. California's textbook guidelines require careful attention to inclusivity, multiculturalism, and equality, while Texas's require that textbooks not challenge traditional family structures, authority, or Christian religion. That publishers seek to produce materials that will be adopted by both states gives you some idea of just how bland and content-free most of them must be.

Because this book belongs in the "what's wrong with America today" genre, its final chapter is devoted to the problem's solution. Although Ravitch's argument-building process can be tedious, her point is well-taken, and her solution is coherent and logical, if unlikely to come about. First, she says, textbook publishing must become open to competition: textbooks should no longer be adopted state-wide, but at the district or even the teacher level. Second, publishers should be required to make the anti-bias guidelines they use, and the textbook review process, public. Finally, she'd like to see teachers better educated, better trained, and more trusted, so that they can be allowed to choose their own textbooks, or even to teach without textbooks.

What Ravitch reveals is a textbook production system that is not, as we might naively suppose, about producing the highest-quality works for the purpose of best educating children. It is a marketing system driven by the need to sell, sell, sell, and it has been twisted by the enormous influence available to small, dedicated groups who take advantage of most people's apathy and naive trust of the system.

I was frustrated as I read by flaws of usage and fact which are inexcusable in a book by a former high-ranking official in the Department of Education. Among the errors I noted:

• Pity the poor textbook writers who must meet all of these mandates and prohibitions. Imagine the challenge as he or she sits down with a list of forbidden words and phrases and tries to explain American history.... (Pronoun-referent disagreement; 40)
• The school superintendent suppressed not only that book but required teachers to write a rationale for every book they intended to assign unless it was on the state-approved list. (parallelism: should read "not only suppressed that book"; 74)
• ...the most challenged books were of the Harry Potter series, assailed because of their references to the occult, satanism, violence, and religion. (factual error: I've read the Harry Potter books and they contain no references to satanism. She should have clarified that challengers of these books perceive them to contain such references; 71)

This book may be eye-opening to the apathetic majority who naively trust the education system, if any of them bother to read it, though they might have preferred to get their lesson in one long essay rather than a couple of hundred heavily padded pages. I'll keep this title in mind for recommending--with mild reservations--to anyone I happen across who thinks the best way to educate a child is to send her to school. For others like me, who've already thought critically about education, or who have merely paid attention to mainstream media reports on controversies over book-banning or "intelligent design," it's not a required read.

One more thing: if I were in the mood for heavy textual analysis, I'd point out that, while the book takes on both right-wing censorship of textbook content (such as references to evolution) and left-wing censorship of language (such as words and phrases perceived to be racially biased), the title Ravitch chose puts the onus on the left. A sign of bias? Hmmmm.

Posted by Su Penn at June 19, 2003 03:48 PM | TrackBack