Blinding Blandness
by David Bromwich
Post date 08.07.03 | Issue date 08.18.03
The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
By Diane Ravitch
(Alfred A. Knopf, 255 pp., $24)
Diane Ravitch is a leading scholar of secondary education whose advocacy of a K-12 curriculum drew considerable notice in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were good reasons for worry then. Perhaps we worry less now that three out of five college seniors can place the Civil War within the correct half-century. Ravitch became an assistant secretary in the Department of Education under President George H.W. Bush and spoke out for voluntary national tests, which she thought should be managed by the National Assessment Governing Board and not the Department of Education. President Clinton followed up on this suggestion and appointed Ravitch to the governing board, but voluntary tests were never approved by Congress. Democrats opposed them because the funds were earmarked for tests alone; Republicans opposed them on the ground that nationally supervised tests were a harbinger of centralized control of education.
In the course of this honorable defeat, Ravitch made a discovery. As public education is now ordered in the United States, you could not devise an exacting standard test in literature or history or social studies even if the political will were there. What stands in the way is a network of "bias and sensitivity panels" to which the publishers of the tests defer. And since publishers depend on similar panels to check every detail of textbooks, it is almost impossible to put together a coherent textbook in history, literature, or social studies.
The Language Police is a documentary account of the methods and the impact of the bias and sensitivity panels. Yet the book has broad consequences for one's thinking about all education, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the molding of public discourse in America. Ravitch began by reading closely the reviews of a draft of the Voluntary National Test, and she worked from there to the panel reviews for tests generally as well as for textbooks. Her tone is measured and judicious, never strident. She believes that for the past fifteen years or so, a regime of de facto censorship has prevailed over large tracts of secondary education. Nobody aimed at this result. The culprits are fretful citizens, acting from moral and religious anxiety, who have been allowed to become meddlers in public affairs. Their way of achieving a better world is to enforce a nicer classroom.
At the bottom of this wish is probably a fantasy--sponsored in our society by lawyers and therapists, and abetted by many politicians and some teachers--that there exists a human right never to have a bad experience. The bias and sensitivity handlers make the reasonable deduction that nobody should have a bad experience in the classroom. If the only way to ensure this is to remove from the classroom all surprising stimuli of any kind, that is a price they are willing to pay. Ravitch's case is fairly made by the first third of the book. The rest is additional evidence, background from the 1950s and the 1970s (when monitors of the educational right and left tasted power and first tightened the screws), some book lists to offset the bad lists and the bowdlerized mush of the handlers, and finally a plea: "We can stop censorship."
How does this regime of censorship work? To an outside view, the bias and sensitivity panels have been assigned the role performed at a newspaper or a magazine by fact-checkers. But their factual authority is also moral authority. Imagine, then, behind every marginal query the furrowed brow of a priest who can set the fallible author to quaking with the level words, "Did you write this?"
Whole institutions buckle at the challenge. The Educational Testing Service, Ravitch learned, makes it a practice to discard a question that draws even one such query or qualm. It is not worth the fight. From her own encounter with the panels, Ravitch concludes that their comments "have the inevitable effect of stripping away everything that is potentially thought-provoking." It is a pretty sweeping accusation, but her book supports it convincingly.
The Voluntary National Test was contracted to Riverside Publishing, the producer of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills--"one of the most esteemed tests in the nation," according to Ravitch. The Riverside guidelines for test questions forbid the following topics because they are "emotionally charged":
Abortion; creatures that are thought to be scary or dirty, like scorpions, rats, and roaches; death and disease; disrespectful or criminal behavior; evolution; expensive consumer goods; magic, witchcraft, the supernatural; personal appearance (such as height and weight); politics; religion; social problems (such as child abuse, animal abuse, and addiction); unemployment; unsafe situations; weapons and violence.
Even the most casual reader will detect the hand of the right-to-life and animal rights lobbies and maybe a patrolmen's benevolent association. A broader and more pervasive influence is the fundamentalist religious right. Test questions must "avoid any mention of fossils or dinosaurs." These topics--one must say it again--are forbidden, not just framed by a warning to handle with care. But how do you construct a social studies test without bringing up politics or religion? How to mention work, or employment, without trailing a fringe of a hint of its opposite, unemployment? The world in which the tests and textbooks are required to take place is not merely fictional. It is a world that has been methodically purged of reality.
This result is a calculated effect of an entente cordiale between censors of the left and of the right. The parties do not consult each other formally. They do not have to. Each works through the medium of the test and textbook publishers. Each is able to gauge the other's influence. And it must be supposed that each is pleased and comforted by the other's success. Part of this story was told a decade ago by Joan DelFattore in What Johnny Shouldn't Read, a valuable history of the textbook wars. DelFattore pointed out, as Ravitch does less prominently, the all-importance of the Texas and California markets in securing the fortune of any textbook. If you can rope in those big states, you have a winner. But to a textbook publisher, California means the multicultural left and Texas means the religious right. They can be brought together only by the most skillful juggling and blending.
Or perhaps the metaphor should be cutting and pasting--more cutting than pasting. Ravitch describes the symmetry well when she says the right-wing censors believe that if children "read stories about disobedient children, they will be disobedient; if they read stories that conflict with their parents' values, they might abandon their religion." Thus the purpose of reading becomes the reinforcement of "appropriate moral behavior." Left-wing censors as well, starting from the maxim that you are what you read, "want children to read only descriptions of the world as they think it should be." Schoolchildren are permitted to read either about a simple world that was or a simple world that will be. Commonly they get a thin Panglossian gruel combining elements of both.
Readers who went to school a generation ago may assume that Ravitch is only describing the familiar process by which reality is altered for harmless consumption in the classroom. But what is amazing is the assiduousness with which the garden now is kept sterile to make sure it stays free of weeds. A story submitted for the Voluntary National Test concerned a "heroic young blind man hiking up an icy trail to climb Mt. McKinley." What could be more inspirational? This story was pronounced guilty of regional bias, because its details of hiking and mountain-climbing favored students who live in such regions. It was also guilty of (what might seem counterintuitive) disability bias: the success of the hiker could be taken to imply that, ordinarily, blind people do not take such risks and are worse off than those with normal sight. Regional bias, when you come to think of it, is a plausible charge against a story that takes place anywhere; but it is used by the sensitivity handlers in some remarkable ways. They objected to a capsule biography of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who designed Mount Rushmore--about which Ravitch notes, in her deadpan manner, "Whether one likes or hates it, it is there." The mere naming of this monument or its sculptor, it was feared, "might offend Lakota Indians, who wish that the sculpture were not there." A story about an owl had to be deleted because "the owl is associated with death in some other cultures," and the negative connotations might make students uncomfortable.
You cannot set out to construct a selection so morally, politically, and religiously correct that it is sure to evade a shocking charge of some kind. Take the story of "a legendary dolphin that guided ships through a dangerous channel." Ravitch observes that the testmaker, "perhaps in anticipation of a bias review," omitted "the part of the legend in which a passenger on one ship shoots the faithful dolphin, which survives but never guides that particular ship again." That would seem a fair inoculation against the twin perils of death trauma and vengeance trauma. But no: from the perspective of the handlers, the problem here again was regional bias, in a peculiarly disguised and insidious form. The ocean, too, is a region. Students who read this sample and did not live by the sea could become, while taking the test, mind-wrackingly disabled by the envious thought of those who do live there.
Can it be that the only way out of the trap is allegory? Consider the fate of the passage describing a rotting stump in a forest, in which "a succession of insects, birds, plants, and animals" come to dwell in peace. A story with a charmed life, you might think--décor, plot, and dramatis personae all smarmily rigged to suck up to every imaginable patron, from the Rotary Club to UNICEF; and, to top it off, a no-fault environmental message about nature's own ecology. But, again, no. The bias committee voted unanimously to reject the friendly rotting stump. "Youngsters who have grown up in a housing project may be distracted by similarities to their own living conditions. An emotional response may be triggered." Here one may safely say that all the ugliness of the scene was in the minds of the sensitive censors.
The above examples may seem morally unified in one way: all are concerned with bias against the unprivileged. But that turns out to be a shallow and misleading generalization. The truth is that the censors deny that there is such a thing as privilege. They insist on a world that is hospitable alike to smart and dumb, rich and poor, able and incapable. A story proposed for the test concerned a rich baker who sued a poor man for smelling his goods and then not buying anything. The baker argues in court that the poor man "stole" the smells; the judge is unimpressed and chides him for his meanness. A harmless and genial story, but rejected by the sensitivity panel--first on the ground that it set up a class antagonism between rich and poor, and second because it showed the poor man unable to do anything to remedy his poverty. "I could not understand," says Ravitch with dismay, "how reviewers could regard this passage as biased against the poor traveler unless they failed to grasp the point of the story." Though she does not use the word totalitarian, the casuistry that puzzles her is a pure product of the totalitarian mind.
What kind of question succeeds? "Analyze the effects of a poor diet on black women." An absurdly strained effort of edification, as Ravitch is quick to notice, since a poor diet has equally negative effects on all people. Here is an apparently similar question: "Identify cultural advantages of urban living." But that is a banned question. Why? Because it might make the non-urban students feel depressed. And well may they feel depressed. Cities have real advantages: about this Federico Fellini and James Madison are agreed. It is a fact universally acknowledged that the greatness of American cities is painful to kids from the sticks, the dumps, the cornpone redneck backwoods, the vastland flatland heartland darkness of our republic under the night, the blasted suburbs and knee-bend lane-ends where the zombie cellular people live--if you call that living. Just possibly, the sentence above would have slipped under the radar of the sensitivity handlers. World-weary misanthropy bias is not yet on their charts.
This leads us to the problem of stereotypes. "Men," Ravitch reports, "may not appear as plumbers and lawyers; women can." So, too, "women must not be shown as weepy and emotional and men must not be shown as strong and brave." In the world postulated by the bias panels, Ravitch adds, "women would be breadwinners; African Americans would be academics; Asian Americans would be athletes; and no one would be a wife or a mother." The bias handlers have been transfixed by a truth about prejudice that they have then gone on to misapply. Prejudices are wrong when they conduce to selfishness and cruelty and support the blindness of human beings toward the facts of the individual case. But prejudices have to do with judgments, as stereotypes have to do with types. Forgetting this, the expert panel on test content, in the quest for a content that should be stereotype-free, found itself obliged to shun every type, kind, rule, probability, and likelihood, and so to reduce all representation of persons and situations to a tepid and colorless medium. You are allowed to portray nothing but the hopeful case that runs contrary to probability and in splendid defiance of stereotype--the single mother who works as a plumber in the morning and in the afternoon tutors the neighbor's son in calculus; the Wall Street lawyer who retires at fifty-five to become a gourmet cook and support his wife through medical school.
California washes out the language. Texas dumps the content down the drain. This formula will be found to explain many otherwise mysterious phenomena of the censorship regime. Thus we have Texas to thank for the caution against fossils and dinosaurs. And California, no doubt, for this: African tribes must be referred to as "groups"; huts should be "little houses"; the historically accurate sentence "women were granted the vote in 1920" gives way to the accurate but more uplifting "women won the vote in 1920." Two unintended effects of such rules deserve to be noted. First, they shrink the working vocabulary of readers. "Little houses" does not call up the same picture as "huts," but if a generation grows up never learning of "huts," then "little houses" is all they will say. Second, the prohibitions drastically foreshorten the range of moods, voices, and possible tenses of English grammar. The correction "women won the vote" was also determined by the opportunity--favored by almost all composition teachers--to exchange the supposedly weak passive to the always preferable active voice. But now and then in reality something happens to someone, and the passive voice may give the more accurate impression.
Let us pass from beancounting to the higher criticism. A full-length book proposed for classroom adoption requires an array of families and households of every type--two-parent, one-parent, aunt-and-uncle-centered, families with older siblings in charge, households with other adults in charge. After a drawn-out attempt to conciliate the panels for one book, editors at Holt rejoiced that they had attained a balance of male and female characters, only to see the revised count emerge from a Texas feminist sub-panel who, when they threw in the animals, found that actually males outnumbered females two to one. "Children of this age," said one of these second-round critics, "are influenced by a story about Mr. Rabbit just as much as they are influenced by a story about Mr. Jones." To say nothing of Mr. McGregor.
The protocols of race, age, and gender make a particular sorrow for illustrators, who are liable to feel their pencils guided through every stroke of every frame. Some of the best have quit in exhaustion and despair; but they are not the saddest victims. One comes away from The Language Police impressed above all at how shabbily the cops on the bias panels, and their vigilante deputies in focus groups, have behaved toward those who try to meet them more than halfway. Ravitch's account of the multicultural battering endured by Gary Nash's multicultural textbooks is grimly instructive. Here was an anti-establishment, anti-consensus, eclectic, and well-meaning historian, and they could not leave him for even a moment unhindered and unrebuked. At least, after the denunciations and the revisions, he got the California contract.
Censorship in California is run by committees and communities. In Texas, it is the family business of Mel and Norma Gabler--a cottage industry with national ramifications. The Gablers are a sensitive two-person alarm system calibrated to trip at any hint of anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-American views. Most publishers quickly learn to appease them by a pre-emptive self-censorship. To enter the house of the Gablers in peace, you must undertake to assure them that bad behavior such as lying, cheating, stealing, or violence of any kind has been "clearly resolved within the framework of the selection." Anthology editors also are invited to ask themselves a question: "Does any part of the selection (even one word or sentence) imply a support for the theory of evolution?" The cosmetic methodology of such warnings has now made converts well beyond Texas. This accounts for the scrubbing of an article on Matthew Shepard ("murdered because he was gay," as Ravitch accurately says) to remove all mention of homosexuality.
The second half of The Language Police suggests that Ravitch has a cause at heart besides exposure and emancipation. She would like schools to offer their students real works of literature to read. Here she is fighting an anesthetic protectionism more than a generation old--a trait perhaps inseparable from the moralism that Tocqueville associated with the American distrust of eccentricity. Great writing, from Coriolanus to Oblomov, tends to be eccentric. It may be wise for literature teachers not to say this too often or too loudly.
A less defensible sort of prudence was shown in the "standards" for literature sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Readers Association. These standards were published in 1996 after funding had been suspended in 1994 by the Clinton administration. The cause cited for suspension had been lack of content. And the standards do indeed lack content: a perfect lack, perfectly achieved. They mention not a single author or a single book that students should read. Meanwhile, literature, spelling, grammar, and composition are melted down (shall we say melded?) and re-christened "language arts"--allowing class time to be spent on fusion activities not discernibly connected with reading, writing, or grammar. This is a familiar scandal, but worth recalling since its effects are still with us, and Ravitch hits back at the empty standards by printing a long appendix with her own list of recommended books.
I am not sure how far Ravitch would agree that, bad as English is, the teaching of history is worse off and its wanderings still unsung. English has defined its subject matter so tolerantly that students themselves are puzzled to give it a better name than language arts. History has defined its subject matter so diffusely as to render the details unmemorable and the contours indigestible to any but a virtuoso. "The books," says Ravitch after reading a dozen textbooks on world history, "overflow with artwork from civilizations around the world, but they suffer from superficiality. It is highly unlikely that children can absorb so many different epochs and civilizations. It is equally unlikely that there are more than a handful of teachers or college professors who know enough about the history of the world to teach such a course well. Students would learn more if they could spend an entire year, or even a semester, studying one civilization in depth rather than skimming across the history of the world." Multimedia skimming may be taken to complete the effect. I know a tenth-grade history class in a private school where the required reading on the Industrial Revolution was Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. Most of a week in class was given to a showing of the movie of the book.
Still, a debate is lurking here, with more to be said on the other side than Ravitch will allow. The defender of world history might argue: "We want students to learn the variety of human life and the histories that have led people to the different societies we see in the world. The demonstration of variety should come first; nothing is more basic than that." A similar argument could be made in literature for the good of displaying--before you try to interpret anything--the structural range of the genres that have shaped the literature of many cultures. From this point of view, samples are just as good as works, and civilizations not learned in depth have value for showing the possibilities. But in the end I have to agree with Ravitch. Nothing in the study of literature matters more than helping a student to see that a work in words is something its maker built with care; and for every reader this discovery occurs in the reading of a single work, with a gradual and revelatory view of its internal relations. In the same way, nothing matters more in the study of history than helping a student to compare the motives and the consequences of a given course of action--the conquest of India by Clive in the 1750s and 1760s, the network of treaties that bound Europe on the eve of World War I, the permission given by the Kennedy administration for the assassination of Diem.
The textbooks, on the face of things, may seem rather aimless and slack, but as Ravitch notes they are tender toward certain pieties--chiefly the piety about piety. Cultural identity is a low-church superstition, taught by the few to propitiate the many, but who could have guessed this result: "The textbooks' treatment of religion is consistently reverential, even deferential; they seldom discuss the role of religious belief as a source of conflict. In their eagerness to show respect to all religions, the texts soft-pedal religious hatreds and the religious roots of many wars in history." This is a particularly American form of gutlessness.
Ray Bradbury, a non-pious writer, discovered in 1979 that in order to obtain class adoptions, his publisher "had quietly, and without his permission, removed 75 sections from Fahrenheit 451." Maybe it was the high Enlightenment message of that popular and affecting book that prompted the demand for so many cuts. The censors in the novel burn books. The censors who re-issue the novel only shred. They capitulate routinely because they begin by assenting to the premise that a work of fiction can be treated as pure content. If a woman in a drugged state watches reality television on a wall-sized screen, that is the author telling his readers that it is OK to take drugs. If a man acts courageously but fails to prosper, that is the author telling his readers that virtue is a hollow thing.
You may say for the Bradbury shredders that at least they began with a piece of real writing. Only eight states have English language-arts standards that so much as mention a work of literature; the best of these, according to Ravitch, are Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, and Mississippi--an oddly assorted group. Yet this shows that, when parents and teachers care enough, a curriculum can still be made. And it was never easy. Ravitch attended the public schools in Houston in the early l950s, and in some of the most vivid pages in the book she relates her experiences there. During her junior year, a right-wing watchdog group called the Minute Women of the USA "wreaked havoc on the school system with a campaign of intimidation and name-calling." For a time these people "dominated the school board and used their control to toss out textbooks and humiliate teachers and administrators whose views offended them," Ravitch writes. "I don't think it is an overstatement to say that the Minute Women unleashed a reign of terror during their brief ascendancy." These people were the precursors of the Gablers, and of Tom DeLay. The Los Angeles public schools that I attended in the early 1960s were milder, but they still bore a traceable family resemblance to Houston. You were free to read The Catcher in the Rye if you brought a note from home.
It is sometimes said that the left won the culture war of the late 1960s and the right won the political war. I think that this is true; and that things would be better now if it had been the other way around. Our lawmakers have become less liberal than our institutions and laws. Our culture has become more libertine than its consumers. Why should the disproportion matter? There is less grating resentment in a society and less nagging annoyance when politics offers an outlet for reform and culture sets a conventional standard of restraint. Public thinking and speech in such a society have less need to resort to fantastic disguises. Educational censorship bears some of the blame for these distortions because it leaves students utterly unprepared for the moral battles that will confront them out of school. And here the obvious postscript must be offered. If the story Ravitch tells were pursued into higher education, the dominant force for censorship would be seen to swing leftward. Teaching is a smaller part of the reason than is generally supposed. More damage has been done by the elaborate dating protocols and the harassment rules, the speech codes and the sometimes enforced emphasis on appropriate speech.
A recent New York Times Magazine profile described the politics and the personal styles of some right-wing students on college campuses. The drift of the story was that these students see themselves as rebels: their manner is hip and defiant, their costume either dandyish or grungy and faded in the manner of left-wing students in the Free Speech Movement. I have encountered these students too. They are an unintended consequence of censorship from the left--just as the fiercest defenders of free love and socialism, for a generation or more, were an unintended consequence of the Catholic Church. Right-wing students today are passionate about ideas. Left-wing students are compassionate. In the narrow but formative setting of a college, it is the left-wing students who identify with the authorities.
To anyone who has studied or taught in America at any time before the last decade, nothing could be more surprising than this antithesis. And yet it sheds some light on the temper of politics in the country at large. What gave American political culture, in the Clinton years and after, the high coloring and the wildness of a masquerade was the credulity with which the actors sustained their school-time roles, the moderate established liberal and the violent excluded conservative, even when in political reality the balance of forces was quite otherwise. The left-wing personality of our time, a loser in politics but a winner in culture, is guilty and satisfied. The right-wing personality, a winner in politics and a loser in culture, is angry and resentful even at its moment of triumph. It is censorious and utterly uncensored.
The regime of censorship that has been part of secondary education since 1950 was begun in the Cold War years by people like the Minute Women. That the American left gradually added its weight to the repression was an intellectual disaster that took its greatest toll against the left. In political practice, liberals came to believe their own propaganda about unbiased speech, safe speech, polite speech. The new-model protocol left its mark on everyone from Geraldine Ferraro to Nancy Pelosi and from Michael Dukakis to Tom Daschle, everyone young enough to have been touched by the race and gender etiquette of the 1970s. It is possible that so many liberals today speak with a paralyzed blandness, even in response to the most demagogic calumnies, because they believe it is their duty not to create a hostile workplace. So a liberal lawmaker may criticize the president in these terms: "I was made very uneasy by the way the president spoke the other day about how we're going to keep soldiers in Iraq. It's going to be economically expensive, of course, but also emotionally and physically expensive for our soldiers who have to stay so long, in such unfriendly conditions. I don't think many Americans have a comfort level with that yet." What the liberal will never say is that a president who could use the words "Bring 'em on!" to strut his defiance of the killers of American soldiers was showing a heartless bravado peculiarly attractive to a man used to living through others.
To say it like that would be so insensitive, so biased. Not the least valuable element of Diane Ravitch's provocative book is a suggestion that emerges almost without the author's help. The voicelessness of the left that is so marked a feature of American political life today was partly self-imposed by complicity in the establishment of a regime of educational censorship.
David Bromwich teaches English at Yale University and is the author, most recently, of Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry (University of Chicago Press).
