Political Correctness and Textbooks
Letter, News-Topic (Caldwell County, NC)
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Tom Shuford (retired public school teacher)

Benjie Watts wants stories of “political correctness run amuck” ( May 8). Herewith is such a tale.

President Clinton appointed education historian Diane Ravitch to the National Assessment Governing Board (NAEP) in 1998. Ravitch had served the first President Bush as an assistant secretary of education. Early in her tenure on the NAEP Ravitch had hints of what would turn out to be political correctness on an Orwellian scale here in the USA.

A NAEP subcommittee was meeting with the president of a major test publisher. They asked the publisher to include some passages from good literature on the test–not the usual bland selections: “We asked whether the company would choose some readings drawn from myths and fables and classic literature.”

The publisher told the panel that would be difficult: “Everything written before 1970 was either gender biased or racially biased.” It was a casual remark, notes Ravitch, spoken as if uttering “a truth too well known to need explanation.”

The remark triggered research that led in 2003 to Ravitch’s “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn,” a book glowingly reviewed across the political spectrum.

Almost all literature created before 1970 does indeed have girls and boys, women and men, speaking and acting in pre-1970 stereotypical ways. Consider any fairy tale, any classic. Moreover, African-Americans and Native Americans were ignored or portrayed stereotypically. There is truth in the offhand remark of the publisher.

Our state education systems sought to make amends. Unfortunately, the logic of fairness, mechanically applied, can wreak havoc. America has undergone, is undergoing state-sponsored cultural cleansing.

The project begs for exposure for three reasons: 1) literary quality and narrative flow are now distant considerations to representational concerns; 2) censorship and distortion of this magnitude–even if limited to elementary and secondary schools–is a threat to the free expression of ideas; and 3) there are better ways to address valid social concerns.

Two examples from “The Language Police” hint at the scope of the phenomenon:

1) Most of us can imagine, with some effort, what a steady diet of sanitized textbooks does to children, but what is the effect on the creators of the new textbook “literature”? From pp 40-41:

“In 1990, the New York Times described an author and an illustrator who couldn’t take the shifting [bias and sensitivity] mandates anymore….‘Maybe it was the messenger at the door with another set of guidelines, updating the set she [the author] had received from the publisher a few days before. Maybe it was the elaborate recipes for an ethnic and racial mix in the cast of characters.’ The article quoted an artist who stopped accepting textbook assignments in 1986 after receiving the latest instructions from the publisher for an illustration:

‘It’s etched in acid in my mind. They sent 10 pages of single-spaced specifications. The hero was a Hispanic boy. There were black twins, on boy and one girl; an overweight Oriental boy; and an American Indian girl. That leaves the Caucasian. Since we mustn’t forget the physically disabled, she was born with congenital malformation and only had three fingers on one hand.”

‘…They also had a senior citizen, and I had to show her jogging.’

‘I can’t do it any more.’

2) Cleansing school literature of stereotypes and representational deficits is easy. Stories that don’t meet sensitivity guidelines can be ignored–or changed. Need more females? Make the engine of “The Little Engine That Could” female. A real example (pp 94-95). History is a challenge. History must be reinterpreted to advance social objectives. One method is to use present-day standards of behavior to evaluate people who lived in the distant past.. It’s called “presentism.” Ravitch’s description of the bias guidelines for textbook publishing giant McGraw-Hill is illustrative:

“The MH [McGraw-Hill] guidelines express barely concealed rage against people of European ancestry. They deride European Americans for exploiting slaves, migrant workers, and factory labor; they excoriate the land rapacity of the pioneers and mock their so-called courage in fighting Native Americans: ‘Bigots and Bigotry,’ say the guidelines, referring to European Americans, ‘must be identified and discussed.’ European Americans, the guidelines suggest, were uniquely responsible for bigotry and exploitation in all human history….” (p. 44)

Terry Gross, host of National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” program, interviewed Diane Ravitch on April 29. Listen to a riveting 33-minute encapsulation of “The Language Police” by the author at the link below. Click on “Author Diane Ravitch”: Listen to a riveting 33-minute encapsulation of “The Language Police.”

The tip of an iceberg having been exposed, it’s important to put today’s textbooks in perspective. Fifty years ago, long before political correctness and multiculturalism became driving issues in textbook production, states were adopting boring, committee-written textbooks. That outcome is built into the process. Today’s PC textbooks are merely exotic variations on an old theme.

Ravitch makes three recommendations. First, get states out of the textbook adoption process: “The states should publish their standards for different academic subjects and then let schools and teachers decide how to spend their funds for materials.” (These could include books that stand on their own–popular histories and biographies, for example.)

Note: Anyone can read the other two online at Amazon.com: 1) find the display of the hard-cover book; 2) type “165” in the “Search Inside The Text” window. (That’s the page where the recommendations start.) Time to read a whole chapter? Make it chapter seven, “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption.” It starts on page 97. Type “mad, mad” in the Search Inside the Text window. Select the “page 95” link (the text is two-pages ahead of the computer). As only two or three pages load, you will need to repeat the process four or five times to read the chapter–selecting a higher page number each time.

Ravitch’s sensible recommendations will almost certainly be ignored. State education monopolies have no need to pay attention. So I would add a fourth recommendation: Let parents decide where to send their children to school. Sports teams get better with competition; businesses improve because they have competition; schools–and their textbooks–would get better with competition.

The past decade has seen progress on the school choice front. There are 3,000 charter schools nationwide. Home schooling is an accepted option. Some states are experimenting with tax credits and vouchers. The majority of parents will always choose the local neighborhood school, but they–not a distant government entity–should make that choice.

There is strong interest in South Carolina in Governor Mark Sanford’s Put Parents in Charge” initiative. Here is how it works (from a 2-26-04 press release from the governor’s office):

– Tax credits can be claimed by relatives for direct tuition payments for a public or independent school or for contributions to a qualified scholarship-granting organization (SGO).
– A dollar-for-dollar tax credit may be applied against a person’s income tax and school property tax liability.

Last week the national Home School Legal Defense Association endorsed the measure because the tax credits would also apply to the expenses of homeschooling families. For details on the proposal, go to Google, type “Put Parents in Charge.” The Governor’s press release is the first link.

On May 12 the SC House Ways and Means Committee put off a vote until the next session. Governor Sanford will keep pressing. The South Carolina education establishment will stay on the alert. They are organized. Parents are not. Even so, some day something like Governor Sanford’s Put Parents in Charge Act may get by guardians of the status quo. Education’s central planners will suddenly take note. The catalog of follies that is The Language Police will get some attention.

This article was published on EducationNews.org. Email the author, Tom Shuford, a retired schoolteacher from Lenoir, N.C.