The Language Police: the review

(You know, one of the complaints my girlfriends had about having kids was that there was no more time to read books. I don’t seem to have that problem. Heh. Maybe I’m letting my kids run around like wildebeests or something.)

Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police: How pressure groups restrict what students learn is a study of how textbooks—and therefore school itself—has been hijacked by forces both on the right and the left to reflect their desires and worldviews:

Censors on the right aim to restore an idealized vision of the past, an Arcadia of happy family life, in which the family was intact, comprising a a father, a mother, and two or more children, and went to church every Sunday…It was a happy, untroubled setting into which social problems seldom intruded. Pressure groups on the right believe that what children read in school should present this vision of the past to children and that showing it might make it so. They believe strongly in the power of the word, and they believe that children will model their behavior on whatever they read…

Censors from the left believe in an idealized vision of the future, a utopia in which egalitarianism prevails in all social situations. In this vision, there is no dominant group, no dominant father, no dominant race, and no dominant gender. In this world, youth is not an advantage, and disability is not a disadvantage. There is no hierarchy of better or worse; all nations and all cultures are of equal accomplishment and value…

For censors on both the right and the left, reading is a means of role modeling and behavior modification. Neither wants children and adolescents to encounter books, textbooks, or videos that challenge their vision of what was or what might be, or that depict a reality contrary to that vision.

The book is filled with hilarious and terrifying examples of the kind of censorship she’s talking about. The two most powerful state school boards in the country are, of course, California and Texas, and they roughly stand at opposite ends of the spectrum (I’ll leave it up to you to determine which stands where). If publishers can make it there, they can make it anywhere, so they vanilla up their books to satisfy the requirements of the two behemoths. What this results in are books so bland and boring that no one wants to read them. But who cares? The publishers have already made a killing, because centralized school boards have approved these texts for purchase—meaning school districts can buy these books with state funds or other books with their own funds. Which do you think they do?

The various bowdlerizations of literature Ravitch includes—from a story named “A Perfect Day For Ice Cream” that becomes “A Perfect Day” with no mention of ice cream because ice cream is a proscribed topic in California, because it encourages obesity, to an edited version of Fahrenheit 451 (irony’s not pretty, but it sure is hilarious)—are very sad. Not only because our children need to be protected from various things, but because they’re being presented with such boring stuff to read. We wonder why people are not just illiterate but antiliterate?

Schools cannot beat the entertainment industry at its own game. What they have to offer students is the chance for intellectual freedom, the power to think for themselves rather than gorge themselves on the media’s steady diet of junk food.

But under the present regime of censorship, the schools themselves are not intellectually free. They cannot awaken young people’s minds with great literature when the stuff in their literature textbooks is so banal, so ordinary, so engineered to appeal to childish narcissism. They cannot expect students to think critically about social issues and the world when their history textbooks do not demonstrate critical thinking. When their reading is constrained by the fine filter of bias and sensitivity codes, how can it possibly contribute to the forming of critical and independent minds? How can young people discover the drama of history when their textbooks anesthetize them with a relentless slog across the centuries, lumbering from one event to the next, from one culture to the next? Great history consists of great stories, surprising convergences, the conflict of powerful ideas, and the historian’s insights into motivation and character that illuminate the life of a man or woman—but all of that has been sacrificed to the gods of coverage and cultural equivalence…

I’m not sure there is any way to avoid this kind of censorship of materials so long as we have these mass markets for product. One of the suggestions Ravitch gives is that the power for buying books should be given back to local school boards, so that they can make their own decisions about what to buy and not have to rely on the behemoth state boards. I’m not entirely sure that would solve the problem—wouldn’t the publishers still want to make their wares as vanilla as possible for the greatest number of purchases?

Great literature does not comfort us; it does not make us feel better about ourselves. It is not written to enhance our self-esteem or to make us feel that we are “included” in the story. It takes us into its own world and creates its own reality. It shakes us up; it makes us think. Sometimes it makes us cry.

The same is true of the study of history. It is possible to spend one’s time learning only about one’s own family or ethnic group. But there are worlds of adventure, worlds of tragedy awaiting us if we are willing to let go of our solipsism, our narcissism, our need to study only ourselves…

One of the interesting books I’ve been reading recently (see also: first paragraph of this entry) is Not Out Of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz, which takes on the theory of Afrocentrism, which says (among other things) that black Africans were responsible for the philosophical advances of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Lefkowitz writes of how she was stunned not only by the wild inaccuracies and poor scholarship presented by proponents of Afrocentrism, but how her colleagues were unwilling to engage in the intellectual debate necessary to weed out bad or useless ideas.

Rather than being encouraged to ask questions, to read widely, and to challenge any and all assumptions, students were being indoctrinated along party lines…

In [Not Out Of Africa] I want to show why Afrocentric notions of antiquity, even though unhistorical, have seemed plausible to many intelligent people. In part, the explanation lies in the present intellectual climate. There is a current tendency, at least among academics, to regard history as a form of fiction that can and should be written differently by each nation or ethnic group. The assumption seems to be that somehow all versions will simultaneously be true, even if they conflict in particular details.

In The Language Police, Ravitch condemns the process of making literature and history “relevant” to the students at the expense of accuracy. Yes, she discusses what “accuracy” is. No, it’s not easy. Yes, each of us would probably have our own ideas of what should be included.

The problem now, it seems, is that the extremes of the left and right are tearing apart the idea of a shared culture and history. By mutilating and enervating our shared cultural stories, we are hastening our cultural balkanization.

When we as a nation set out to provide universal access to education, our hope was that intelligence and reason would one day prevail and make a better world where issues would be resolved by thoughtful deliberation. The great goal of education was not to cultivate an elite, but to abolish class distinctions to the extent that education can do so. Here is the rub. Intelligence and reason cannot be achieved merely by skill-building and immersion in new technologies; elites have always known this and have always insisted on more for their children. Intelligence and reason cannot be developed absent the judgment that is formed by prolonged and thoughtful study of history, literature, and culture, not only that of our own nation, but of other civilizations as well.

That is not what our children get today. Instead, they get faux literature, and they get history that lightly skims across the surface of events, with no time to become engaged in ideas or to delve beneath the surface. Not only does censorship diminish the intellectual vitality of the curriculum, it also erodes our commitment to a common culture. It demands that we abandon our belief in e pluribus unum, a diverse people who are continually becoming one. The common culture is not static; it evolves to reflect the people we are becoming… Our nation has a history and a literature, to which we contribute. We must build on that common culture, not demolish it. As our common culture grows stronger, as we make it stronger, so too grows our recognition that we share a common destiny.

At the back of her book Ravitch provides a list of works she thinks would constitute a decent, and interesting, reading list for Grades 3 through 10, including poetry, biographies, and novels. “Great Books” lists are always tough because someone’s going to be offended and someone’s going to be left out. But you know what? You can always read more. You have to start out with the basics somewhere.

Anyhow. I liked The Language Police very much, even though its depiction of the kinds of censorship (from without and within) in our schools is deeply, deeply disturbing.