The Language Police

There are many shocks to the senses one encounters as someone in her late 50's decides to finally pursue an undergraduate degree. I've arrived at a sort of peace with the body piercings, backwards baseball caps, and every sentence ending as a question, ya know? There is one thing which continues to intrigue me, however, and that is the textbooks. Beyond the fact that they were clearly developed for a generation used to information being summarized in factoid form, the efforts on the part of editors and publishers to present a perfectly unbiased, sanitized for social content text are amazing. I set out to find some corroboration for my perception of the textbooks and found Diane Ravitch's THE LANGUAGE POLICE on the library shelves. While show more her portrayal of textbooks swings the pendulum to the critical extreme, it does raise some interesting questions...questions that are important for anyone interested in how information is being gathered and presented...to any generation of students. show less

Examines how the current publication of history textbooks and their perspectives on history have been profoundly affected by the interests of pressure groups from the left and right wings, sensitivity and bias committees, and state departments of education. It describes the publishers' bias guidelines for their editors, writers and illustrators; verboten topics all along the spectrum; even the ratio of men to women, people of color, disabled and abled in book illustrations. The author decries that today's textbooks do not provide rich language and that they confuse the stories of the history of the land, the origins of the American people and the history of the nation-state. (p. 154) All in the interest of "protecting" children and show more "boosting" their self-esteem. Revealing and depressing. show less

I'm only 5 or 6 chapters into this book, and already she's explained why the textbooks I was forced to read in school were so mind-numbingly boring! I would recommend this book to anyone interested in what schools are teaching.

Timely report on the effect pressure groups have on the literature taught in The public school system