"In her incisive and lucid new book, The Language Police, historian Diane Ravitch shows how ideological pressure groups shape and control the content of today's textbooks and standardized tests. Other books have attacked the effects of 'political correctness' in schools. (See Losing Our Language, reviewed in the June 1999 issue of TIA.) But Ravitch's sweep is broader. Her survey encompasses not merely the absurd linguistic 'sanitizing' that pressure groups have injected into classrooms, but also the substantive distortions and outright corruptions of literature and history curricula....
"Multiculturalism's unholy trinity of race-gender-class is omnipresent. One publisher was assailed because its anthology of stories failed on the grounds of 'representational fairness.' There must be not only a balance of ethnicities, ages, sexes of the characters in the story—but also of authors. (Editors are encouraged to become intimately familiar with the data of the US Census bureau, so that they can accurately balance the representatives of each ethnicity, sex, social class.) One pressure group demanded that only members of a specific group be allowed to review books about their own group—blacks reviewing books on blacks, for example. Another publisher was attacked for its faulty accounting of the gender ratios in its anthologies, which it claimed was one to one. A chapter of the National Organization of Women challenged that assertion; when the animals in the stories were counted, the gender ratio turned out to be two to one."
From "Expelling Reason from the Schools," by Elan Journo, August 2003.
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