| From
the July/August 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Book ’em
 here
are some people you just want to plunk down with a whole pile of
children’s books, and Diane Ravitch is the first person I
want at the table. Lady, take a seat.
As Ravitch would tell you, that sexist imperative
of mine would earn me a ticket from the people she calls “The
Language Police.” In her recent jeremiad The Language
Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf),
Ravitch, an influential education adviser to Republican and Democratic
administrations alike, outlines a conspiracy of left- and right-wingers
who exert pressure on textbook publishers and educational testing
companies to censor (her word) what children read in school. She
writes, “Educational materials are now governed by an intricate
set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered
controversial or offensive.”
While Ravitch’s exposé is repetitive,
unevenly documented, and overwrought, she makes an important point.
The guidelines for language and content enforced by market-wary
educational publishers are frequently ludicrous and wrong-headed,
and The Language Police provides many alarming if entertaining
examples, such as McGraw-Hill’s rules for textbook illustrators:
“Pioneer women doing domestic chores must be replaced by pioneer
women chopping wood, using a plow, using firearms, and handling
large animals.” As Ravitch points out, there’s an Orwellian
reshaping of reality, not just language, that goes on when political
considerations outweigh pedagogical purpose. But Ravitch’s
outrage can make her clumsy, as when she asks a question that’s
better than she thinks it is (“Is it a good thing that words
like policeman and fireman are not used in our
schools?”) and follows it with a lead-footed joke (“Should
schools change Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman to
’Death of a Sales Representative’?”).
The best joke is an unintentional one: “With
everything that might offend anyone removed, the textbooks lacked
the capacity to inspire, sadden, or intrigue their readers. Such
are the wages of censorship.” No, such are the wages of textbooks.
It is ironic that Ravitch, a proponent of national educational standards
and testing, seems surprised that anything with such high stakes
— standards, tests, textbooks — that has to satisfy
such a large and varied constituency will perforce be subjected
to a host of demands. It is disingenuous of her to label her own
complaints about curricula as objective and those of her opponents
as censorious. And it’s just plain foolish that she expects
textbooks to inspire or intrigue (I think we all agree that they
sadden) when there are other books, individual books by individual
writers for individual readers, that can do a far better job.
In an appendix compiled with California teacher
Rodney Atkinson, Ravitch provides a list of just such books, the
“Atkinson-Ravitch Sampler of Classic Literature.” It’s
an adequate if musty list — and oddly Anglophilic, given Ravitch’s
reiterated if never explicated complaint about the foreign ownership
of American textbook publishing. Leon Garfield’s Smith
as the sole representative of modern children’s fiction? From
the evidence presented in The Language Police, Ravitch knows only
enough about contemporary children’s literature to dismiss
it, demonstrating a blithe indifference that tells me her own blinders
are just as secure as those on the “pressure groups”
she condemns. She twice calls young adult literature banal and once
humdrum, although she allows that it can be engaging. In
keeping with her conspiracy theory, she complains darkly about “certain
writers” “not well known to the general public”
appearing “again and again” in textbooks; her list includes
Jane Yolen, Walter Dean Myers, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gary Soto, and
Julia Alvarez. Well, Ms. Ravitch, there’s your summer reading
list. Get busy.
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