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03/05/03
Banned
from US textbooks: owls, ketchup, dinosaurs and old ladies with cats
Julian
Coman
Daily
Telegraph
Fictional tales involving dinosaurs,
disobedient children, coffee, Irish-American policemen and "exemplary
upper-class people of bygone days" are being excised from American
schoolbooks, according to a newly-published study on classroom policy in the
United States.
The prohibitions are devised and enforced by
educational publishers fearful of losing lucrative state contracts if they break
the rules of political correctness, or offend Right-wing fundamentalists. Their
self-censorship is backed up by "guidelines" issued by some state
governments.
The result, according to Diane Ravitch, the
author of the study and an assistant secretary of education in the previous Bush
administration, is that publishers are flooding schools with bland stories that
she dismisses as "pap".
The state of California, the biggest buyer of
education textbooks in America, has instructed publishers not to include
references to unhealthy foods such as "french fries, coffee, bacon, butter,
ketchup and mayonnaise".
Apparently innocuous topics are judged too
controversial for juvenile consumption. A "bias and sensitivity review
panel" employed by one leading publisher recently ruled out the use of a
test comprehension passage about owls. The owl, said the panel, is taboo for
Navajo Indians, and its appearance in a test may "distract" a native
American pupil.
Meanwhile the Irish-American policeman, a
favourite stereotype in 20th century American story-telling, is to be written
out of history. Not only the Left is having an impact on American classrooms.
References to dinosaurs are being excised because they raise questions about
evolution which offend the religious Right.
The educational publisher, AIR, now lists
"dinosaur" in its glossary of banned words. All references in stories
to fossils and dinosaurs must be substituted by "animals of long ago".
The obsessive attention to the content of
children's books is likely to stop a future American J K Rowling in her tracks.
The Harry Potter series, which contravenes educational publishers' guidelines by
referring to the occult, satanism, violence, religion and owls, has been listed
by the American Library Association as the "most attacked" book in the
US.
Other classics that have been targeted include
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (both for
racial references). Jane Austen and Charles Dickens have been excoriated for
perpetuating gender stereotypes.
Ms Ravitch spent three years investigating the
workings of secretive bodies that censor the literature that reaches American
schools for her study, The Language Police.
She discovered that children must not be
represented as disobedient, while elderly people should never be represented as
feeble. Instead, positive images of pensioners keeping fit are encouraged.
One contributor to a junior school textbook
gave up her job after being asked to include a senior citizen in one story
"and show her jogging". Authors and illustrators for the giant
American educational publisher, McGraw-Hill, meanwhile, are given a long list of
gender stereotypes to avoid and, more controversially, invert.
They are told to replace "mother bringing
sandwiches to father as he fixes the roof" with "mother fixing the
roof". "Boys playing ball, girls watching," should be replaced by
"Co-ed teams, boys watching."
Companies that develop school tests and select
reading passages for examinations have also assembled long lists of topics which
must be avoided unless strictly necessary to the school curriculum.
Riverside Publishing, which provides tests for
children throughout America, rules out references to abortion; creatures thought
to be scary or dirty, such as scorpions, rats and cockroaches; death and
disease; disrespectful or criminal behaviour; evolution; expensive consumer
goods; magic, witchcraft, the supernatural; personal appearance; unemployment
and unsafe situations.
Ms Ravitch claims that her research lays bare
the power exercised by lobby groups - from both ends of the political spectrum -
over the reading matter of American children. Guidelines issued to children's
writers combine "Left-wing political correctness with Right-wing
fundamentalism", she writes, and aim "to create a new society, one
that will be completely inoffensive to all parties".
The most depressing result of such censorship,
says Ms Ravitch, is the mind-numbingly dull literature that emerges at the end
of the review process.
"The guidelines guarantee the exclusion
of imaginative literature from our textbooks," she says. "They assume
that everything that was not written in conformity with their mandates must be
racist, sexist, ageist and harmful to any group that has ever known oppression
and exclusion.
"Is it any wonder that students who read
such pap do not enjoy reading and that they see little connection between art
and life?"
America's educational publishers say that they
are powerless so long as lobby groups retain such influence.
Charlene Gaynor, an executive director of the
Association of Education Publishers, said: "It has become part of the
business. You need to be aware of the pressure groups and their standards if you
want to be able to sell the product."
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