From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Red Pencils, Low Marks
How the diversity industry dumbs down American education.
Last spring a Brooklyn mother named Jeanne Heifetz noticed something fishy on New York state's standardized high-school English exam: an excerpt from a book she'd once read had been altered. Her curiosity piqued, she gathered 10 exams from the past three years and discovered that most of the literary passages had been expurgated. References to race, religion, sex and other hot topics had been removed or softened. A "fat" boy had become "heavy," a "gringo" was now an "American," and a childhood memoir about visiting "the Negro section of town" had been stripped of racial content. Elie Wiesel's declaration that "Man, who was created in God's image, wants to be free as God is free" had been reduced to the lifeless slogan: "Man wants to be free."
Faced with public outrage and mocking headlines ("The Elderly Man and the Sea?"), state officials quickly promised to end the practice. But nothing about the episode surprised Diane Ravitch. As she notes in "The Language Police," the educrats in Albany were just following the rules of their trade. Like test-makers and textbook publishers everywhere, they had subjected their exams to the scrutiny of professional "sensitivity reviewers." The mandate of these red-pencilers? To "eliminate, delete, remove, replace, revise--that is, censor--offensive material."
On the theory that a proper K-12 education should upset no one and affirm all, elaborate protocols now exist for the content of classroom materials. Ms. Ravitch, the country's soberest, most history-minded education expert--and, in this case, a whistle-blower extraordinaire--fills her book with one outrageous example after another (sometimes, alas, to the point of repetition). Especially useful is her appendix titled "A Glossary of Banned Words, Usages, Stereotypes, and Topics." Printed in single-spaced small type, it goes on for 32 startling pages.
To begin with, anything even remotely sexist is verboten. Banished from respectable texts are such troublemakers as "babe," "chick" and "co-ed," but so too are solid citizens like "actress," "brotherhood" and "cattleman." Women are not to be portrayed as frightened, indecisive or vain; men as too assertive, analytical or violent. As for race and ethnicity, perish the stereotypical thought that Asians are studious and hardworking, that blacks excel in sports and music, or that Jews ever lived in tenements. Subjects to avoid range from divorce and junk food to Easter, Malcolm X and old people with canes and walkers. Nor should innocent minds be exposed to such retrograde expressions as barbarian, egghead, geezer, gimp, heathen, mulatto, Oriental, sissy, spastic, squaw, swarthy, Third World or tribe.
In a spirit of even-handedness, Ms. Ravitch gamely tries to pin the blame for this orthodoxy on "pressure groups" at both ends of the political spectrum. As she points out, right-wing yahoos have agitated to block the teaching not just of Darwinian evolution but of other supposed sources of subversion. Texts that cast an unfavorable light on the traditional family or on American institutions have drawn their ire, as have the adventures of Harry Potter (an agent, it would seem, of the Prince of Darkness).
Still, whatever mischief they cause, it's not the likes of Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly who have generated Ms. Ravitch's glossary of the "insensitive." Nor are they responsible for the demand that every group (with the exception of white European males) receive its rigid quota of pages in literature anthologies. Least of all are they the ones who, to Ms. Ravitch's distress, have imposed a template of "cultural equivalence" on the teaching of history. (The Aztecs? Sun-worshipping technologists. Mao? A reformer in a hurry.) The real villain of "The Language Police," as Ms. Ravitch's evidence demonstrates, is the multicultural left. Bible-thumpers may wield a veto, but the agenda of today's curriculum is set by the advocates of "diversity."
What has magnified the influence of activists is the hopelessly corrupt way that textbooks and tests are produced. Classroom materials have become the almost exclusive domain of mammoth corporations like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Reed Elsevier and Vivendi, whose prime concern, Ms. Ravitch shows, is not to educate but to avoid controversy. Texts are composed by committees of nonspecialists who go light on words and heavy on graphics and who do everything with an eye to the political vagaries of Texas and California, the two states that dominate the national market by virtue of their size and centralized purchasing. Ms. Ravitch rightly argues that nothing would better serve the cause of reform than for Austin and Sacramento to relinquish their monopolies.
Simple truthfulness and a respect for the integrity of texts are not the only casualties of the language police. Students know when they're being propagandized, and they respond accordingly. "As they advance in school," Ms. Ravitch writes, they "recognize that what they see on television is far more realistic and thought-provoking than the sanitized world of their textbooks." The point of teaching history and literature, she concludes, is not to "comfort us" or "make us feel better about ourselves." Rather it is to open up the world in all its confounding complexity--a world in which, for better and worse, white men often lead, great books seldom comply with EEOC guidelines, and everyone occasionally gets called an ugly name.
Mr. Rosen is managing editor of Commentary.
