Only men bake cookies in these parts reviews Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police, How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn and describes how textbook publishers have preemptively censored themselves with “bias and sensitivity” guidelines:
What do dinosaurs, mountains, deserts, brave boys, shy girls, men fixing roofs, women baking cookies, elderly people in wheelchairs, athletic African Americans, God, heathens, witches, owls, birthday cake and religious fanatics all have in common? Trick question? Not really. As we learn from Diane Ravitch’s eye-opening book “The Language Police,” all of the above share the common fate of having been banned from the textbooks or test questions (or both) being used in today’s schools.
It only gets worse:
Among those rejected by the “bias and sensitivity” panel was a passage about the patchwork quilts made by 19th century frontier women: “The reviewers objected to the portrayal of women as people who stitch and sew, and who were concerned about preparing for marriage.” The fact that the passage was historically accurate was considered no defense for its “stereotypical” image of women and girls.Another story about two young African American girls, one an athlete, the other a math whiz, who help each other learn new skills, was red-flagged for stereotyping blacks as athletic (even though one of the girls was not an athlete but a mathlete).
A passage on the uses and nutritional values of peanuts was rejected because some students are allergic to peanuts. Stranger still, a story about a heroic blind youth who climbed to the top of Mt. McKinley was rejected, not only because of its implicit suggestion that blind people might have a harder time than people with sight, but also because it was alleged to contain “regional bias”: According to the panel’s bizarre way of thinking, students who lived in non-mountainous areas would theoretically be at a “disadvantage” in comprehending a story about mountain climbing. Stories set in deserts, cold climates, tropical climates or by the seaside, Ravitch learned, are similarly verboten as test topics, since not all students have had personal experience of these regions.
Also forbidden: owls (the animals are taboo for Navajos), Mt. Rushmore (offensive to Lakotas), dinosaurs (suggestive of evolution, hence offensive to creationists), dolphins (regionally offensive because they live in the sea) and Mary McLeod Bethune (this early 20th century civil rights pioneer had the lack of foresight to use the no-longer-fashionable word “negro” in the school she founded).
Both the right and left wings have made their demands felt:
Meanwhile, thanks to the fundamentalists, “controversial” subjects like divorce, magic, ghosts and disobedient children have been banned from textbooks, while, thanks to their left-wing counterparts, children need not encounter nasty words like “handicapped,” “hearing-impaired,” “handyman,” “fraternize,” “brotherhood,” “actress,” “heathen” or “backward country” in their increasingly banal, denatured reading.
As Ravitch says, “Rewarding groups that complain by allowing them to censor words and images that they don’t like only encourages them.”