PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

The problem? Publisher guidelines require that textbook, "passages may not show certain socially sensitive features of the world as it was or is. That includes prohibitions against depictions of mothers in the mid-19th-century West teaching their daughters to make quilts for their dowries because this characterizes females as soft and submissive; and against the story of Mary McLeod Bethune, who in the early 20th century raised money from wealthy whites to open a school for black girls, partly because the appeal to white philanthropists was judged to be patronizing. A story about a young blind man's heroic hike up Mount McKinley was rejected because it is considered biased to suggest that blind people can have a harder time doing particular tasks than sighted people."

The solution? "Eliminate the statewide textbooks adoption process, and substitute a competitive market, with school districts choosing their own books and materials. And let the sun shine in by compelling all states and publishers to reveal their bias guidelines and by placing on the Internet all the deliberations of bias and sensitivity panels, including what they reject."

Daniel Kevles on Diane Ravitch's The Language Police:How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Read Chapter 1.

Posted by Greg Ransom