Young Minds Force-Fed With Indigestible Texts
As the commissars of political correctness on the left and the fundamentalist sentries of morality on the right have clamped down on the education system, more and more subjects, words and ideas have become taboo. According to Diane Ravitch's fiercely argued new book, "The Language Police," the following are just some of the things students aren't supposed to find in their textbooks or tests:

¶Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little (because mice, along with rats, roaches, snakes and lice, are considered to be upsetting to children).

¶Stories or pictures showing a mother cooking dinner for her children, or a black family living in a city neighborhood (because such images are thought to purvey gender or racial stereotypes).

¶Dinosaurs (because they suggest the controversial subject of evolution).

¶Tales set in jungles, forests, mountains or by the sea (because such settings are believed to display "a regional bias").

¶Narratives involving angry, loud-mouthed characters, quarreling parents or disobedient children (because such emotions are not "uplifting").

Owls are out because some cultures associate them with death. Mentions of birthdays are to be avoided because some children do not have birthday parties. Images or descriptions of a mother showing shock or fear are to be replaced by depictions of both parents "expressing the same facial emotions."

Mentions of cakes, candy, doughnuts, french fries and coffee should be dropped in favor of references to more healthful foods like cooked beans, yogurt and enriched whole-grain breads. And of course words like brotherhood, fraternity, heroine, snowman, swarthy, crazy, senile and polo are banned because they could be upsetting to women, to certain ethnic groups, to people with mental disabilities, old people or, it would seem, to people who do not play polo.

In "The Language Police," Ms. Ravitch — a historian of education at New York University and the author of "Left Back," a 2000 book about failed school reform — provides an impassioned examination of how right-wing and left-wing pressure groups have succeeded in sanitizing textbooks and tests, how educational publishers have conspired in this censorship, and how this development over the last three decades is eviscerating the teaching of literature and history.

The "bias and sensitivity reviewers" employed by educational publishers, she argues, "work with assumptions that have the inevitable effect of stripping away everything that is potentially thought-provoking and colorful from the texts that children encounter," and as a result, school curriculums are being reduced to "bland pabulum."

Ms. Ravitch — who served as an assistant secretary in the federal Education Department under President George H. W. Bush, and who was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises national testing — writes with enormous authority and common sense. She shows how priggish, censorious and downright absurd "the language police" can be, and she does so with furious logic.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/29/books/29KAKU.html