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Title: The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch ISBN: 0-375-41482-7 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.64 (53 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Profound implications for what they teach in public schools
Comment: Public School textbooks are chosen by curriculum committees, most of which work at the school district and state levels.
Though Ravich doesn't reflect much on this fact, taking it as a given, it is perhaps the root of the problem. The staff and teachers of an individual school don't have the freedom to choose the materials they use for teaching. This is wrong from the very start. Teachers do a better job if they teach what they know. I use can effectively use recipes in teaching fractions because I know about cooking. If it is working for me, my kids are learning math, culture, a bit of reading and maybe a practical skill. It wouldn't work at all for another teacher.
Now to Ravich's argument. Textbook and text selections are made by state level committees in Texas and California. These committees are subject to immense pressure from both left and right wing organizations on every conceivable subject: evolution, abortion, homosexuality, multiculturalism, and on down the line.
The textbook and test creators are businesspeople. They want to avoid conflict. They do it by reducing their products to the consistency of pap, inoffensive to everybody but by the same token uninspiring to everybody. The states pick it and dictate that the teachers teach it. I suppose it makes no difference to somebody whose vision of himself is as an automaton in a huge state bureaucracy, charged with dispensing small doses of standardized learning. I am sure also that there are teachers who reluctantly adopt the role of automatons and teach what is given them.
People with passion are ditching the public schools. I have had kids in, taught and served as a board member of private schools. All of them in our area are swamped with applications. Why? The teachers really care. A big part of that caring is that the teachers can choose what they teach. They do it according to their own interests and the skills of the makeup of their individual classes. They meet frequently to make sure that their curricula fit together year to year and across courses.
I thought about political correctness Thursday as I substituted for a Spanish class. As the classroom teacher had left an assignment for the students to work on, I was able to engage a very intelligent Marxist in a discussion in Spanish about the revolution by the indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico. Public school would never entertain materials on either Sandinistas or Contras, or for that matter, any significant dialog about Palestinians and Israelis. Sad, because it is issues like these, in which the kids are invested, that lead to the best teaching and learning.
Homeschoolers have grown from a few thousand to a couple of million over the last two decades. The moms I have talked to are passionate about letting their kids select an interest and pursue it. One kid liked Chinese food, then saw a picture of the Great Wall of China in a picture taken from space. He spent a month visiting museums, reading and writing about Chinese history. What is most profound is that this student liked school and this teacher liked teaching. Why? Because they did it their way. I hardly need to add that the standard pose of most schoolkids is total boredom. It is more than an affectation.
I've digressed to a bigger issue, the fact that almost every aspect of public education is highly standardized, highly politicized and highly bureaucratized. Ravich's book shines an intense light one nasty symptom within a far more pervasive syndrome.
Rating: 5
Summary: Shocking, as it should be
Comment: Anyone who cares about the state of education in America, and we all should, will be apalled at the state of education politics described in this book. Children are being denied the opportunity to learn their own history, and to learn how democracy and protection of basic human rights can improve our world. Instead, they are subjected to a relativist view of the world where all cultures are equal, even those that oppress their members. On the other side of the spectrum, right wing interest groups try to deny students accurate information about science, religion, health, and social problems. In an attempt to shield them from things they may find upsetting, these lobbying groups are keeping children from learning about how the world really is and what they can do to make it better. If the current generation of kids learn only what these special interests want them to learn, I shudder to think about the problems of the world that may go unaddressed simply because no one understands them. This book is an eye-opener, and I urge everyone to read it and take action to fight the power of the politically motivated censors over our children's education.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Language Police - Informative, Insightful
Comment: Diane Ravitch explores a question that few people have the insight to see, the destructive qualities of self-censorship that most major textbook publishers utilize to extremes in fear of pressure groups influencing book sales. At the end of the self-censorship, these textbooks cannot contain any bias. This includes such outlandish practices including 1) not asking test questions related to the ocean (biases people living in landlocked states), 2) never mentioning/depicting the elderly doing stereotypical elderly practices (such as knitting or sitting in a rocking chair, because that suggests that the elderly are unable to function the same as everyone else), 3) not depicting or explaining owls (because of a Navajo taboo), and banning phrases like "better half" in lieu of its being "sexist" and "freshman" (also sexist). First of all, there is something wrong with this country when people are discomforted to the point that it distracts their academic learning because they saw an elderly person sitting in a rocking chair knitting. Granted that stereotypes are something that I believe should be avoided, but we cannot overlook the fundemental reasons why the stereotype exists, because it is true so often that people internalize them as stereotypes. Theres a good reason for elderly people not to be doing strenuous work, probably because they are old and their bodies cannot perform as well. This isn't being prejudiced, this is fact. Additionally, it is hard to believe that regional biases affect students that much that it makes it exceedingly difficult to the point of being distraught. Aren't kids exposed to the world (and ALL facets of the world, unfortunately), earlier than our parents anyways? In a society where the age for teens having sex is dropping, drug use in middle school is on the rise, and sex topics exist everywhere in prime-time sitcoms, I want to know which child hasn't even seen images of the ocean before and therefore have at least an inkling as to what a body of salt water is like. I didn't need to go to the mountains to understand their climate being more elevated than the plains, its intrinsic to the image of "mountain". I think that, instead of being afraid they might offend kids who don't live near the ocean, things ought to be explained to children in a controlled and enjoyable manner. It is nearly impossible to even get kids to pay attention to their classes in the first place, teachers should be incorporating a wide variety of the human experience (even if that experience is indirect), in order to captivate and encourage students to learn. Who can write an intelligent, vibrant textbook without mentioning the wonders of seahorses and seaturtles. If there is no regional bias, whose region becomes the standard? A dull one filled with banal descriptions of cats and mice (I am guessing), that I think would discourage kids even more from learning. Also, in all the self-censorship, there is a great deal of withholding real-life information and experiences, such as secularism, racism, and sex. Do we really want our kids to learn about these things by themselves, or rather in a controlled, instructional environment? I know that I would discuss the problems of real-life racism, sexism, and religion with my kids than have them learn by experience (Note: I am NOT saying that experience is all negative or worse than instructional discussion) in an uncontrolled setting that I do not know how to properly guide and control. Wake up America, your not saving your kids from harm by attempting to pass over controversial questions, your hurting them by not telling them about it. After all, what is learning environment if it does not teach about real life?
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Title: Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform by Diane Ravitch ISBN: 0743203267 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: August, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add by Charles J. Sykes ISBN: 0312148232 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: September, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The American Reader : Words That Moved a Nation by Diane Ravitch ISBN: 0062737333 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First by Mona Charen ISBN: 0895261391 Publisher: Regnery Publishing Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values by Tammy Bruce ISBN: 0761516638 Publisher: Prima Lifestyles Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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