Language Police

Diane Ravitch’s book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, follows the tragically humorous tale of textbook publishing, adoption, censorship, and testing in America and how what started as an honest effort to correct the wrongs of racial and gender bias has now ballooned into an idiotically impossible attempt to create school history texts that offend none and give all an equal voice. As I read this brilliantly obvious book I began to list in my head the very problems with school texts mentioned. One specific example comes up again and again in many, many school history texts. This problem is one of modernity. The problem of modernity seems to be a ditch that many textbook companies cannot seem to drag themselves out of. For example, the text that I am currently using in class makes reference to the rise of the two party system in American political history under the tutelage of Jefferson and Hamilton. I have no problem with this reference. These two men held great influence in this area of American political history. What I have a problem with and what is lost on the minds of the influentially naive minds of my middle school students is the comparison made by the text and the modern political parties, the Republicans and Democrats. The text draws a direct, unwavering, and absolute comparison with the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans of the 1790’s and the Republicans and Democrats respectively of the 21^st Century. There is no possible way to make the absolute statement that the Republicans of today are the same political party as the Federalists of the 1790’s, but that is precisely how it is delivered to the students who read this text and without proper historical guidance from a properly educated history teacher that is all they will know.