The Language Police; a Panel's Bizarre Recommendations · 3:40am Jan 21st, 2021
I've been reading a lot of books lately, & one of particular interest is The Language Police, written by Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education. It is about how authoritarian voices on both sides have created bizarre censorship standards of education.
The book opens with a chapter informing how this all began. It started at around 1997, when Bill Clinton proposed national tests for elementary school students. This didn’t come to pass in the time or the way that he initially suggested, but it made many people in charge of education throughout the country interested in reforming American education. During this time of reanalysis of education standards, Congress appointed many experts to supervise the NAEP, & these organization was called the NAGB. The author was appointed to this position herself, with hopes to, in theory, provide proper supervision in American education.
In practice, she found that it was the reverse; contractors were supervising the standards of the NAGB, scrutinizing what the NAGB was approving as approvable cirriculi on the national scale.
What the NAGB was doing back when people thought Bill Clinton’s VNT would come to pass was trying to find interesting educational books in order to make test questions that children could easily answer without said education being too dumbed down. They went through & approved of many short stories for children. Two years later, a contractor’s bias & sensitivity panel wrote to the NAGB participants recommending to remove the following stories for the following reasons:
The History and Uses of Peanuts.
The contractor’s panel requested to remove two short informational passages about peanuts, because “some people may be severely allergic to them” (Ravitch, pg 8) & because the term “African slave” was considered objectionable, because “the correct usage now is enslaved African”. (Ravitch, pg 9)
Women and Patchwork Quilting
The contractor’s panel requested the removal of a passage about 19th century frontier women teaching their daughters how to sew, viewing the very act of women sewing as “stereotypes of females as ‘soft’ and ‘submissive’”. (Ravitch, pg 9)
The Blind Mountain Climber
The contractor’s panel requested to drop a story about a blind young man who went to the very time of Mt. McKinley, because of “revional bias.” (Ravitch, pg 10) By this definition, regional bias means “no reading passage on a test may have a specific geographical setting; every event must occur in generic locale.” (Ravitch, pg 10) They also believed that some kind of ableism was at work here, rejecting the use of a blind man in the story because “it suggested that people who are blind are somehow ‘worse off’ and have a more difficult time facing dangers than those who are not blind.” (Ravitch, pg 10)
A Fable of Aesop
The contractor’s panel of reviewers recommended the removal of Aesop’s fable, The Fox & the Crow, because they thought it was sexist, since “the crow – a female – is vain and foolish, while the fox – a male – is intelligent and clever.” (Ravitch, pg 11)
A Native American Animal Fable Edited for American Students by William J. Bennett
William J. Bennett served as Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, & infamous for saying that the crime rate would go down if you were to abort every black baby, but also said that it would be an immoral thing to do; thing is, how many grade-schoolers know who he is? Apparently on value of these details, the contractors “suggested that Bennet’s name alone would be sufficient to distress man teachers and parents.” (Ravitch, pg 12)
A Biography of Gutzon Borglum
The contractor’s panel requested to drop his biography because “Mt. Rushmore is offensive to Native Americans.” (Ravitch, pg 12) They asserted that the monument was “an abomination to the Black Hills because many Lakota people consider the black hills to be a sacred place to pray.” (Ravitch, pg 12)
A Story about Growing up in Ancient Egypt
The contractor’s bias & sensitivity panel disliked this story because it mentioned the caste system of Ancient Egypt, claiming that the “references to wealth and class istinctions had an ‘elitist’ tone.” (Ravitch, pg 13)
An Informational Story about a Rotting Stump
There was a story about the symbiotic ecosystems that dwelt within a rotting stump that provided shelter to all manner of birds & insects, & hilariously, the panel disliked this one as well, because “it contained a negative, demeaning stereotype of apartments and people who live in them.” (Ravitch, pg 13) The bias committee was certain that “poor children who had grown up in a housing project would see themselves as insects living in a rotting tree stump if they red this passage.” (Ravitch, 14)
The Silly Old Lady
The bias panel rejected a story about an old lady who kept putting gadets on her bicycle because “women, and especially women at a certain age, must be depicted only in a positive light.” (Ravitch, 14)
There were many more…
Now this was just a contractor's sensitivity board, & this was back in the 1990s. The NAGB fortunately soundly rejected the requests. However, not all people are fortunate enough to be in such a position, & we’re going to continue into the book & see how much worse things got over time, as these kinds of standards became more crucial to state governments over the course of the 21st century’s first decade…
