Pc Literature

[cmotherofpirl]

Author Says Politically Correct 'Language Police' Shred Great Literature

By Jim Brown

August 8, 2003

(AgapePress) - The former assistant secretary in the Department of Education says those now infamous "bias and sensitivity" panels that review public school textbooks and tests often have no experience in the subjects they are reviewing. Educational historian Diane Ravitch fears these reviewers are purposefully chopping up classic literature to remove any content that someone may find objectionable.

So far they have banned use of the word "owl" because the animals are taboo for Navajo Indians, and they have banned mention of Mount Rushmore because the site is offensive to Lakotas. They have also done away with dolphins, dinosaurs, and the word "Negro." But who are these bias and sensitivity reviewers?

Ravitch addresses that question in her new book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf, 2003). The author says bias reviewers are typically people trained in diversity topics like bilingual education, English as a second language, and education of minorities and special groups. But the author is concerned that prejudicial training may be loading the dice against a lot of great literature.

For example, in New York, a person can be trained and certified by the state as a sensitivity reviewer. And while Ravitch admits she has been unable to access closely guarded training materials, she believes they supply would-be reviewers with a rationale "to find anything controversial, anything anyone might object to, and take it out." A year ago, the author notes, sensitivity reviewers in New York State were removing all words relating to race, gender, religion, height and personal appearance.

Ravitch says most sensitivity reviewers hold to the premise that anything that was not written in the last 30 or so years contains either gender bias or racial bias. She calls this idea "patently, demonstrably false." But she points out that reviewers beginning with this belief, which is itself a bias, can hardly fail to find what they are expecting.

"They scrutinize Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson -- virtually everything written before 1970, and say 'let's find the bias against this group or that group.' And it creates a snooper-like attitude toward classic literature," she says.

Ravitch warns that this flawed approach puts the burden of proof on classic literature while suggesting to test designers and textbook publishers that they should emphasize or print only recently written works by modern writers -- those who have "imbibed sensitivity codes."

[Jake Huether]

LOL! Absolutly rediculous.

[Chrysologus]

That's insane. People are insane. INSANE!

[MORight2Life]

That's right. Let's just erase history while we're at it....

Be God's!

-Michelle

[FreeSoul]

Now this is one case where I can say I don't believe in political correctness.

The bible says 'slave obey your master' and while today we don't question its historical relevance to the God's chosen people during biblical times, we shouldn't erase it from the scripture or edit it simply because racists used it to promote their agenda. Let it rest for a reminder of how things used to be and why we are happy to live in the society we do. Editing books because there are racist terms in there sometimes serves as an injustice to children who are denied the ability to learn from the shameful aspects of their history.

[_bc]

Is this by the same Jim Brown who wrote an article about how the University of Michigan was teaching students to be gay?

And while Ravitch admits she has been unable to access closely guarded training materials, she believes...

Sounds really reassuring, like they spent a lot of time and effort finding a fair and trustworthy source of information.

[cmotherofpirl]

Have you read any GOOD textbooks lately?

[_bc]

Have you read any GOOD textbooks lately?

Right now I'm reading Monopsony in Motion by Alan Manning, recommended by my thesis adviser. It's absolutely outstanding, possibly the best textbook I've ever read. Why do you ask?

[cmotherofpirl]

Not college textbooks, kids textbooks.

They are about as politically correct as you can get. Because they set out to spefically offend no one, they can teach very little, especially history.

[_bc]

No, I haven't read any recently. For all I know, childrens textbooks may all be outrageously bad, and I would never pretend to be in a position to judge their general quality. I just think that if the guy who wrote this article had good evidence to back it up, he probably wouldn't quote someone who '...has been unable to access [evidence], [but] believes...' she is qualified to comment on what she hasn't even seen.

In retrospect I probably shouldn't have commented on this article, because the author is probably doing his very best to bring accurate and informative news to his readers. People usually try to do their best, both journalists and sensitivity reviewers.

Edited August 13, 2003 by _bc

[Thomas Michael]

This PC nonsense has already hit Texas. The Alamo has been, for many years, a symbol of courage and bravery, a hallowed institution, San Antonio's most revered landmark. Now all of a sudden the Alamo is offensive to Hispanic sensibilities.

[cmotherofpirl]

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com

Schoolbooks are flubbing facts

By ALISON GENDAR and DOUGLAS FEIDEN

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Saturday, December 21st, 2002

Ever wonder what your children might be learning when they hit the books in the New York City public schools?

A kinder, gentler definition of jihad. It really means "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."

An error-filled version of global geography. The equator actually passes through Florida, Texas and Arizona.

A saga of a swashbuckling hero of today who can be compared to ancient historical heroes dating to the Trojan War: Indiana Jones.

The world of 21st century textbook education is a learning laboratory in which agendas, ideologies and errors all too often trump balance, accuracy and fairness.

"It's a reign of distortion and censorship," said Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University and former assistant education secretary in the first Bush administration. "It's an environment in which words and images are routinely banned." And that's just the textbooks.

On the shelves of school libraries is a biography for young readers of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is said to hail from the "long tradition of activist ministers like Martin Luther King Jr."

But the book might offend some with its own stereotypes, like this line in a chapter on Crown Heights: "Poor blacks in the cities often found themselves at the mercy of Jewish shopkeepers and landlords, who decided when and when not to advance credit to their customers."

There is also a whitewash of Louis Farrakhan, described as a "black American of achievement" who bears a "message no American can ignore." The Nation of Islam leader also shows a "willingness to forgive," the book claims.

Neither the city nor the state has a centralized textbook-approval system. Procurement is done district-by-district — even school-by-school — with the city ordering from a list of 120,000 books that are approved but not mandated.

The Daily News examined scores of textbooks that appear in the city Education Department's voluminous online catalogue — books given the green light by the now-defunct Board of Education for use in teaching the city's 1.1 million students. The titles analyzed include those used in class today, 2003 editions due to arrive in schools early next year and other approved texts available for purchase by the system's 40 superintendents, 1,100 principals, 4,700 department heads and an unspecified number of teachers vested with buying authority.

Asked about The News' findings, City Hall said it would examine how textbooks are reviewed, ordered, tracked and replaced as part of "Children First," the sweeping blueprint for reform that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is set to unveil next month. But officials vigorously defended the quality and diversity of the city's overall inventory.

"The norm is that you will find accurate information in the New York City textbooks," said Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott. "With 120,000 approved titles in the system, there will always be those that can be updated, upgraded or modified for accuracy." Consider, for example, the science texts.

"They are, in a word, atrocious," said John Hubisz, a North Carolina State University physics professor who found more than 100 mistakes in each of at least seven middle school science textbooks approved for use in city schools. "What I saw was horrifying."

Sept. 11 excuses

Some parents might be horrified, too, when they discover how Sept. 11 is soon to be taught to their children.

At least three schools have bought copies of "The American Vision," a 2003 high school history textbook, published by Glencoe McGraw-Hill, that was one of the first to write about the terror attacks. In a seven-page lesson on the massacre of 3,000 innocents, students are asked:

"What are the three main reasons certain Muslims became angry with the United States?"

"Why does American foreign policy anger Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East?"

"The events of 9/11 were unjustified and inexcusable, but they didn't take place in a historical vacuum," said April Hattori, a McGraw-Hill spokeswoman. "It's important to explain what caused Muslim extremists to want to attack America."

The News' review also found dozens of textbooks that are riddled with the most blatant errors.

Prentice Hall's "Exploring Physical Science," a middle school science book used in Queens, confuses Newton (1643-1727) with Galileo (1564-1642). It also pictures the Statue of Liberty bearing the torch in her left hand and calls her skin bronze; actually, it's copper with a green patina, and she holds the lamp in her right hand. Corrections were made in a 1999 version, said spokeswoman Wendy Spiegel. But errors remain in thousands of 1997 editions still in circulation.

McGraw-Hill's "Human Heritage: A World History," a high school social studies text used in Brooklyn, incorrectly identifies Gerry Adams as "a Protestant leader." Actually, he's the Catholic firebrand who heads Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army's political wing.

Hopelessly outdated

Houghton Mifflin's "America: The Glorious Republic," a high school history text, copyright 1990, teaches students in Manhattan and Staten Island about the most recent terrorist massacre — the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. It ends with the inauguration of President Bush — the first President Bush, that is.

"Here we are about to go to war for a second time with Iraq — and I can't even read about the first time we went to war with Iraq," said Martin Quiles, a 17-year-old senior at Martin Luther King High School on the upper West Side.

"You have to laugh," he said. "I was born in 1985, and most of the textbooks I get are older than I am."

Deliberately altered or censored to create false or misleading representations.

The cover of "Economics," a high school textbook due to enter city schools next year, sports a doctored photo of the New York Stock Exchange's landmark exterior.

With a pair of loincloths strategically inserted into the picture, publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston draped the private parts of the two heroic male figures — Agriculture and Science, by name.

"The nudity was inappropriate for kids at this level," said Holt spokesman Rick Blake.

Stripped of relevant passages to avoid giving the slightest offense to anyone. Gail Stein, a French teacher at Long Island City High School in Queens, is the author of several popular French textbooks that deal with Gallic staples — perfume, Champagne, chocolate mousse.

Then her publisher started getting complaints: Perfume was deemed sexist; not all women use it. A line about "bubbles in a glass of Champagne" might foster underage drinking. So out went the bubbly and all other offending references.

When "French is Fun" was released, one woman complained that using cognac in mousse would encourage drunkenness. So Stein's editors at Amsco School Publications asked her to change the next edition. Out went the cognac, out went the authenticity.

"Who would ever get drunk on chocolate mousse?" asked Stein, who has taught at city schools for 32 years.

Said Walcott, "We have to make sure that our textbooks are age-relevant and age-appropriate — but we shouldn't become so politically correct that we water down history or lose sight of accuracy, either."

Tampered photos & falsified captions

The famous 1896 picture of husband-and-wife scientists Marie and Pierre Curie experimenting with radioactivity in their Paris lab was reproduced in Holt's "SciencePlus: Technology and Society." But it was radically cropped to purge Pierre, who shared a 1903 Nobel Prize with his wife.

Holt's Blake said Marie "was a famous scientist in her own right" and that "some of her most important work took place after her husband died."

"When Pierre Curie vanished from the pictures, truth and history vanished, too," said William Bennetta, who heads The Textbook League, a California-based watchdog group that researches textbook inaccuracies.

History also was fictionalized in McDougal Littell's "America's Past and Promise," taught to middle school students in Brooklyn. It prints a 1915 photo of men linking hands around the world's most massive tree, the General Sherman sequoia in California, with a caption that reads, "Conservationists link hands around a tree to stop loggers from cutting it down."

The sequoia was never threatened by loggers. The men were simply demonstrating its enormous girth.

The bogus caption was "a misunderstanding," explained spokesman Collin Earnst. "Once the error was brought to our attention, a correction was made."

But the inaccurate 1997 version is still used to teach New York students.

Brazenly ignoring who they profess to teach

Key Curriculum Press' "Interactive Mathematics Program," a high school math text used in at least five Bronx schools, teaches literature. And history. It contains essays on the "nonfamily" and the "minimal family."

The 515-page textbook contains only 25 pages of equations, estimated Alan Siegel, a computer science professor at NYU who is researching "fuzzy math" programs for the Brookings Institution.

"It doesn't prepare students for college programs requiring math," he said. "They never learn simple computations."

The book's authors say their goal is "to reform the way high school mathematics is taught," presenting it in a manner that reflects how it's used in the real world. Yet one 20-day teaching exercise is built around the Edgar Allan Poe short story "The Pit and the Pendulum," about a prisoner in a torture chamber who escapes a lethal blade attached to a swinging pendulum.

Students must conduct classroom experiments designed to answer the question, "Does the story's hero really have time to carry out his escape plan?"

Watered-down definitions of jihad

The word means "holy war." It refers to armed warfare against infidels to extend Islam's realm, and most Americans know it as what Osama Bin Laden declared on the U.S. before killing its citizens en masse.

Houghton Mifflin's "Across the Centuries," a 2003 social studies textbook used in Queens and Staten Island, sees it differently.

"An Islamic term that is often misunderstood is jihad," it says on page 64. "The term means 'to struggle,' to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil." The struggle "may require action," and the Koran allows "self-defense and participation in military conflict, but restricts it to the right to defend against aggression and persecution."

Said Bennetta, "They make jihadists sound like innocents doing their best to resist a second serving of ice cream."

A Houghton spokesman said the book was reviewed for the publisher by a "multicultural, multiethnic, multifaith panel" that found no problems with it. "Despite how terrorists abuse it, that is the classic definition of jihad," he added.

Infested with brand names

McGraw-Hill's "Mathematics: Applications and Connections," a middle school math book used in Brooklyn, touts Nike, McDonald's and Gatorade. It informs students that the Oreo is the "best-selling packaged cookie in the world" — and has them calculate the surface area of a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes.

They were removed from the text in 2000 after California passed a law banning product promotions in books. But the 1999 and 1995 editions still in schools contain dozens of brands and logos — and they were used to teach the son of state Sen. Velmanette Montgomery (D-Brooklyn) at Park Place Middle School in Crown Heights.

Montgomery was so outraged, she introduced a bill in Albany that would bar school boards from buying books that contain commercial brands, product names or logos.

"Textbooks should be vessels of truth," she said. "Teaching our children to look to commercial products for validation undermines our educational system."

In the meantime, math problems in some classes continue to be formulated like this: "Will is saving his allowance to buy a pair of Nike shoes that cost $68.25. If Will earns $3.25 per week, how many weeks will he need to save?"

Often, the shoddy textbooks penetrate New York City schools by way of Texas.

California, Florida, North Carolina and Texas pick textbooks statewide, giving them enormous clout to shape the books that enter their schools.

In Texas, for example, conservatives can influence selection and sometimes force publishers to alter passages. Books that are shaped and debated in Texas then wind up in New York.

Take the 2003 editions of two social studies textbooks, Glencoe's "Our World Today: People, Places and Issues" and Harcourt's "World Regions." Glencoe wrote of ancient geological events that took place "millions of years ago," like the Ice Age, while Harcourt referred to fossil fuels "formed millions of years ago."

Lone Star State creationists complained that the references conflicted with biblical time lines. So the publishers dropped the phrase "millions of years ago" and substituted language like "in the distant past" and "over time."

The two books, altered in Austin, Tex., have been approved, but not yet bought, for New York City schools.

"To please rednecks in Texas, they're censoring science in New York — and all over America," said Bennetta.

[cmotherofpirl]

Textbook Changes Draw Charges of Political Correctness

Thursday, May 01, 2003

By Anita Vogel

LOS ANGELES — A textbook review process taking place in states across the country has changed or eliminated references to everything from the Founding Fathers (search) to hot dogs, leaving many to charge educators with distorting history in the name of political correctness.

The review process, which is routinely done in many states, is meant to eliminate or replace outdated words or phrases. But what’s happening has a lot of people wondering – quite literally – "Where’s the beef?"

That’s because many textbooks will no longer feature pictures of hot dogs, sodas, cakes, butter and other kinds of food that are not considered nutritious. Nor will the books contain any phrases judged to be sexist or politically insensitive.

The Founding Fathers, for instance, are now referred to as "The Framers," in an apparent effort to make them sound less male-dominant. And there will be no more reading about Mount Rushmore (search), where the faces of four U.S. presidents are carved into stone, because it appears to offend some American-Indian groups.

The changes, which reflect a wide range of political correctness (search), have been brought about by pressure groups on both sides of the political aisle, as both Democratic and Republican legislators have been lobbied.

Snowman? No more. Melt that image and replace with Snowperson. Want to sail away on a yacht? No, again. It’s too elitist.

And if you think grandpa is a senior citizen, guess what? You’re wrong. That’s demeaning, according to the new standards. He is now simply an "older person."

The laundry list of words and images banned or considered offensive is not a short one. The word "jungle" has been replaced with "rain forest." The word "devil" has disappeared entirely, with no replacement.

Many of the changes seem to represent a direct assault on historical accuracy. For example, the new guidelines dictate American Indians should not be depicted with long braids, in rural settings or on reservations. There are no suggestions on how they should be depicted, however.

The problem there, say historians, is that some American Indians did wear their hair in braids, and generally lived in rural settings before being relocated to reservations.

Some say the changes are needed to better reach out to today’s diverse student population. Others have a different name for it.

"It's outright censorship," said author Diane Ravitch, who has written extensively on the subject of how the nation's schools have dealt with the issue. "It dumbs down our textbooks, makes them bland, far less interesting than anything children might see in the movies -- even in G-rated movies or TV.

"The problems that have happened in education is that the textbook publishers and the test developers have become so sensitive to any controversy that whenever they receive a complaint it is very likely that they will remove the source of the complaint," explained Ravitch.

Textbook publishers admit they are in a bind. They say if they don't adopt the changes made by large states like California and Texas, they would suffer severe economic consequences.

Still, there are those who defend the changes made.

"I think our textbooks should, to our greatest capacity, be free of any type of stereotyping," said Sue Stickel, deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the California Department of Education (search). "We need to make sure that all ethnicities are represented. We need to make sure that both males and females are represented. We need to make sure that our materials cover the full gamut."

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[Kilroy the Ninja]

Just adds more fuel to the home-school fire...

Political correctness is a disease and it has insidiously infiltrated all aspects of our lives to some degree or another.

Oh Brave New World with such people in it...

[gopherball33]

this is total and blatant stupidity by people trying to do good but going WAY over the line. the MINORITY should NOT run the MAJORITY. the majority of people think this smells of elderberries. the minority always seems to get their way. atheists got any mention of God or prayer in public schools banned. the majority of this country is not athiest. they also got "under God" taken out of the pledge of allegiance. why does this great country of ours keep following absurd ideas?