My sons don't like a lot of contemporary children's stories - I can tell by their eyerolling they find the milquetoast conflicts and not-so-subtle happy resolutions of suburban animals dressed in American clothes both boring and patronizing (oh, look, two turtles in cardigans learning how to share!). The stories that they love are the big, messy, magical ones - their favorite stories are ones like Shrek! by William Steig (the real, original Shrek, not the watered-down, sugary movie version) and anything from the original, unabridged Grimm's Fairy Tales. These stories are not for the weak of heart; they involve bodily fluids, parents who don't like their children, magical high-stakes situations and conflicts, men and women with super powers and super mutations, half-animal-half-humans, even death. That is not to say that the stories are crude, or poorly executed, because they are not - they're beautiful, full of rich language and imagery that have my sons riveted. They beg me to read them over and over.
But, according to Diane Ravitch's 2003 book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, none of these stories would make it into contemporary curriculum, nor would excerpts be featured on a standardized test or in a textbook. Why? They contain material that has become objectionable, for one reason or another, so they are replaced by the suburban animals having petty domestic conflicts. Cue eyerolls.
Did you watch the Jane McGonigal video from yesterday's post? Because ideas in her TED talk - mainly the concepts of an "epic win" and the journey with "epic meaning" found in video games - are central to today's topic, which concerns why we parents should be concerned with what our children are learning in school. Or, more directly, what they're not learning.
In the first chapters of The Language Police, the educational historian and former US Assistant Secretary of Education details explicitly how special interest groups from both the left and right seek to restrict and even censor language, ideas, historical events and scientific facts from tests and textbooks. Since she served on committees that created national tests during the '90s, and retrieved "bias and sensitivity" guidelines from all the major textbook publishers, we can be assured that she is not guessing or assuming; she copies these documents, word for word, directly into the book. In her deft analysis, what began as an honest attempt at trying to remove racist and stereotyping language from tests and textbooks has become a monster, eating up every kind of interesting piece of learning available to our young people. Politicians, along with the multi-billion dollar book publishing industry, have assumed complete control of the texts that our children read, and they are terrified of children reading material that is not already familiar to them, or contains an idea, an image, a location, or a word that might upset them. As Ravitch handily points out, this leaves out nearly every single piece of literature written before 1970.
The topics and language found objectionable by bias and sensitivity panels range from bizarre to hilarious. Excluded are the history of peanuts (because some children are allergic to peanuts), pioneer women and patchwork quilting (this is gender bias, since women should not be seen doing domestic tasks - even though it's a historical fact), a blind mountain climber (blind people should not be perceived as being different from anyone else); stories about mountains, deserts and beaches are forbidden (because a child may have never been to the mountains, a desert, or a beach), and so are all stories about owls (the reasons for this are too ridiculous to list), stories about class distinction in ancient Egypt (panels don't want to draw attention to income disparity, even in ancient times), and the list goes on and on.
"But that is not all," Ravitch writes in chapter two, "The New Meaning of Bias." "Religious and political issues must be avoided. Reading passages must not contain even an "incidental reference" to anyone's religion. There must not be any mention of birthdays or religious holidays (including Thanksgiving), because some children do not have birthday parties and do not share the same religion." She continues. "There must be no reference in any test passage to evolution or the origins of the universe. Writers must avoid any mention of fossils or dinosaurs. Their very existence suggests the forbidden topic of evolution. However, it is acceptable to refer to 'animals of long ago' if there is no mention of how old they are and no suggestion that the existence of these animals implies evolution."
I find this ridiculous and alarming for many reasons. (In future posts we will talk about the Texas SBOE, and how they ignored the advice of prominent historians and scientists and rewrote our textbooks to include topics that are important to their religious and political convictions - we will cover how destructive this kind of political censorship is to our students and to democracy in general.) But, for now, let's just talk about it from our students' point of view. Could it be somehow connected that American children are doing poorly in school because they find nothing worth learning? If we take away dinosaurs, fairy tales, ancient Egypt, inspiring stories of people with disabilities doing impossible things, stories on mountains, deserts or beaches, stories with conflict and resolution, stories with magic and holidays and mean people, what do we have left?
Turtles in sweater vests arguing over a toy.
Here is where Jane McGonigal's "epic meaning" comes in. In video games, gamers are not asked to take out the trash or learn to share; they are asked no less than to save the world. It's risky, and full of danger and excitement, but to a gamer, it's worth it. This may be the exact same reason my sons love Grimm's Fairy Tales - Hansel and Gretel are small children, but they are fighting for their lives. By not allowing children to use their imaginations in any way, and by stripping bare anything controversial or interesting from stories, are our well-intentioned curriculum writers and book publishers annihilating everything that's interesting about life? Could this be a contributing factor to why each day 7,000 American kids decide to drop out of school?
Go into your child's classroom and take a look at how many real books are there. You will see textbooks and "stories" - tracts or pamphlets written by the textbook company - but what about real books, untampered by committies?
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