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The PC Cancer 30th May 2003 American parents worried about the state of US education can count themselves lucky that their children are being taught anything at all. Political correctness has reached such absurd levels in academia, and now exerts such a fevered grip on publishers, that the list of banned words and subjects in school textbooks has left them sanitised, dumbed down and with little connection to the real world, according to a new study. If one flicks through most American school textbooks, there will, for example, be no mention of birthdays or birthday cakes (cake is not nutritious and some children do not celebrate their birthdays), dinosaurs (because they suggest the religiously controversial subject of evolution), yachts (too elitist), bookworm (offensive), old (ageist), boyish (sexist), God (too religious), or America (suggests geographical chauvinism, better to use “people of the United States”). In The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, Diane Ravitch says that the well-intentioned effort that began in the 1960s to avoid certain words that could be deemed offensive has now been hijacked by numerous pressure groups. Ms Ravitch, a former education official in both the George Bush Sr and Clinton Administrations, and now a New York University historian of education, is scathing of both left and right-wing ideologues for perverting and sanitising the English language. Multiculturalists want to remove all language and images that might be construed as sexist or racist. Christian groups object to topics that deal with evolution, non-traditional family settings and immoral behaviour. Church groups object to the use of language that seems to promote one religion over another. The results of the battles fought over the language used in school textbooks are summed up in a 31-page “glossary of banned words, usages, stereotypes and topics”. The “language police”, she says, are textbook publishers, testing agencies, school associations and the federal Government, all too cowed by the interest groups and their lawyers into appearing anything other than inoffensive. “Some of the censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school,” she says. “There’s no research that shows if girls read a story in which a boy is a hero or where they see the word ‘salesman’ that their test scores will be harmed by this.” Ms Ravitch also points out that many classics are excluded from textbooks, including Shakespeare and Mark Twain’s “Huck Finn”, because they break the rules of language on ethnic and gender grounds. The phrase “able-bodied”, which tops her list, is banned as offensive. The correct term, according to Ms Ravitch, is “person who is non-disabled”. “Adam and Eve” is also unacceptable. To refer to the first human beings on Earth, one must say “Eve and Adam”, because one must “demonstrate that males do not take priority over females”. “Bookworm” must be replaced with “intellectual”, “elderly” with “older persons”, “fat” with “heavy”, “hell” with “heck” — although it is unclear if it is now the road to heck that is paved with good intentions — “man and wife” with “husband and wife” and “slave” with “worker”. She says a lot of people are having fun finding new titles for Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea which presents problems with every word except “and” and “the.” Ms Ravitch says old is ageist, man is sexist and sea cannot be used in case a student lives inland and does not grasp the concept of a large body of water. From Tim Reid in
Washington DC (USA) – The Times (London UK) |