Rrg. And, also, argh.

Gee, thanks, Mary. I really needed my blood pressure raised by your suggesting I read this article on censorship of textbooks.

The article focuses on Diane Ravitch’s book The Language Police, and its description of how forces on both the Right and the Left force textbook publishers into creating inoffensive pabulum that won’t offend either, but won’t excite kids about reading, either. Some examples of what you’re not supposed to see in school books:

– Stories or pictures showing a mother cooking dinner for her children, or a black family living in a city neighborhood (because such images are thought to purvey gender or racial stereotypes).
– Dinosaurs (because they suggest the controversial subject of evolution).
– Narratives involving angry, loud-mouthed characters, quarreling parents or disobedient children (because such emotions are not “uplifting”).
Owls are out because some cultures associate them with death. Mentions of birthdays are to be avoided because some children do not have birthday parties. Images or descriptions of a mother showing shock or fear are to be replaced by depictions of both parents “expressing the same facial emotions.”

This all stands as another example of how the agenda tends to get set by the vocal, rigid extremes, exacerbated in this case by the buying power of a few states (California and Texas) exerting an untoward influence on the textbook publishing business.

What these groups on both the right and left have in common, Ms. Ravitch notes, is that they all “demand that publishers shield children from words and ideas that contain what they deem the `wrong’ models for living.” Both sides “believe that reality follows language usage,” that if they “can stop people from ever seeing offensive words and ideas, they can prevent them from having the thought or committing the act that the words imply.”

I think that was the theory of Newspeak in 1984, too. Yeesh.

While censors on the right aim “to restore an idealized vision of the past, an Arcadia of happy family life” in which Father knows best, Mother takes care of the house and kids, and everyone goes to church on Sundays, censors on the left believe in “an idealized vision of the future, a utopia in which egalitarianism prevails in all social relations,” a world in which “all nations and all cultures are of equal accomplishment and value.”

In other words, all the flavor and controversy of a Star Trek: TNG episode.

Pardon me while I go find something improperly interesting to read to Katherine …