The Language Police

In The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, Diane Ravitch complains about restrictions on public school textbooks and standardized tests. Ravitch provides numerous examples of the detailed rules limiting the material and phrasing that can appear. In response to demands from activists on the left and on the right, textbooks are bland, literature is censured, and historical depictions are inaccurate.

Some requests sound reasonable, such as textbook depictions that reflect the gender and racial makeup of the population. However, many of the limitations go to ridiculous extremes. Almost all literature from before 1970 is unacceptable because it contains images or phrases that students aren’t supposed to see. History books present all societies in a positive light, regardless of what those societies did. Meanwhile, the right objects to material they claim promotes secular humanism, magic, evolution, feminism, and other topics.

The Language Police makes its case, but it felt like an article’s worth of material stretched out into a book. The long lists of censored passages, textbook guidelines, state reading material, and other topics became quite repetitive. Ravitch focused almost exclusively on English and history classes. Her discussion of standardized tests displayed a weak understanding of statistics, and who really cares whether essays on tests are dull? Ravitch was an assistant secretary in the Bush Sr. administration, which made me a little skeptical of her perspective on history texts.

The Language Police was a quick read and involves a little-discussed issue affecting millions of school children. Though it had some faults, it’s probably the best treatment of the subject.