Historians Gillian Frank and Adam Laats write in Slate about the long history of suppressing textbooks that discuss race and class and investigating or firing teachers who veer away from the standard patriotic view of American history.
They describe the classic story of the textbook series written by progressive educator Harold Rugg of Teachers College, Columbia. Rugg wanted students to learn about the social, economic and political problems of contemporary society in the 1930s. His books were widely adopted but fell victim to a rightwing campaign that labeled them as socialist or Communist, which they were not. The campaign was successful, and the Rugg books were ousted from classrooms across the nation.
The authors tie the current efforts to ban critical race theory (taught in law school) and The 1619 Project from being taught in schools to this long tradition of avoiding controversial subjects.
There is an even longer tradition of banning books that mention topics like race, segregation, religion, or a long list of other “offensive“ issues. Censorship extends to textbooks, tests, and library books. I cover that history in my book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.
Even Shakespeare has been bowdlerized for his bawdy language.
The American Library Association posts a list every year of the books most frequently banned. Many classics are on the list.
The Shakespeare plays in almost all the standard K-12 literature anthologies are still HEAVILY bowdlerized. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, which is typically taught in Grade 9, as much as a fifth of the play is typically cut from the anthologized versions.
No “The bawdy hand of the dial is on the prick of noon.”
Though the same folks pass over, out of sheer ignorance, Chaucer’s pun in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, “So pricketh hem nature in hir corages” and the horrific indelicacy of Marvel’s “Then worms will try thy long-preserved virginity,” from “To His Coy Mistress,” which typically appears in the Grade 12 Brit Lit texts.
Big Brother Bowdlerization
The purple shank is long and thick
And bawdy hand is on the prick
But censorship is really thick
So Shakespeare can’t get in a lick
Romeo and Juliet, which is typically taught in Grade 9, as much as a fifth of the play is typically cut from the anthologized versions.”
If you cut out the filth of the play, what’s left?
certainly not the maidenheads
I spent many years working as a textbook editor. A number of states published lists of topics that were forbidden. These included all the standard things like drugs and needles, tobacco, dating, sex, stereotypical depictions of the elderly, women, and people of various races, and so on. But in addition to these, there were unofficial taboo lists that all the educational publishers kept and distributed to editors and writers, which included stuff like genetics, DNA, deep history, geological time frames–stuff that might offend fundamentalist Christian nutcases.
Sherlock Holmes without the pipe. Lord knows, high-school kids NEVER encounter smoking or references to drugs in the popular culture. LOL.
My 6th grade teacher read us “The Grass Pipe”.
But that was in a different age (Age of Aquariums) in a land far far away.
the irony of calling them textbooks
Bob, you’ll be pleased and upset to know that the “textbooks” I used this year were not edited to exclude all the taboos. Follow me on a twisted path.
My “textbooks” included, for example, “Home”, by Anton Chekhov, about a father who catches his son stealing and smoking his tobacco. That was one of the few full short stories included. Most of the reading selections were short snippets of novels. Most of the novels from where came the snippets were previously made into Hollywood blockbusters, so the snippets were like movie trailers; and the “textbooks” included links to Twitter, so the students could tweet about the movies (comparing the book to the movie is an English standard) and give some money to Twitter, and to Amazon, so the students could buy something and give Amazon some money after their teachers did the marketing for the company. (Amazon is also offering automatic employment for all high school grads in LAUSD, so that the kids can all experience working in nonunion, unhealthy, dangerous conditions for peanuts.)
Maybe you see where I’m going with this. The “textbooks” (web apps) are CCSS, Common Core. I don’t know who did the editing, but I doubt they were studious experts like you. The reading selections seem to have been curated by a sales department. When I was a student, we had no apps and no textbooks. There were not any curricula other than what my teachers planned for me. They planned full literature: Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Romeo and Juliet uncut, Invisible Man…
I am opposed to the censorship of teachers. The CCSS-selling textbook industry could probably use a little more censorship these days, really, censorship by academics of corporate marketing in schools.
What program?
It’s McGraw Hill. The textbook is called StudySync and the app is called ConnectEd.
I’ll add https://www.change.org/p/the-proletariat-do-not-allow-jeff-bezos-to-return-to-earth?redirect=false. Jeff Bezos said, “If you see the Earth from space, it changes you.” If you never come back to Earth, it prolly changes you for real.
That assumes Jeff makes it I to space ( in one piece).
Contrary to the common use of the term, “rocket science” is largely about blowing up rockets on the launch pad.
Yep. Firecrackers were invented in China 2,200 years ago. They were called exploding bamboo. Today’s rockets are just really big firecrackers.
Bezos in Space
Seeing earth from space
Can really change a guy
Seeing every place
Where people want to buy
Seeing earth from space
Will energize my Prime
Win the crucial race
For “richest” every time
My first job in educational publishing was with McDougal, Littell, which had run afoul of the American Fundie Thought Police with its “Man” series, which incorporated a lot of material from contemporary anthropology, sociology, and linguistics.
Folks in West Virginia held book burnings of the Man series.
I always wondered where the Burning Man got its start.
Thanks.
Burning Man
The Burning Man
From olden days
Virginian ban
On science ways
The book called “Man”
Did quite offend
Virginians fanned
The burning trend
This was in the 1970s, when few gave any thought to the sexism of a textbook company calling an English language and lit program “The Language of Man.”
The Language of man
The Language of Man
Is “Get me a beer”
While language of woman
Is hard to hear
Language of Man
Another SomeDAM masterpiece
In 1996 I brought my linguistics degree to the teacher credential department and was told, “we don’t teach linguistics in the public schools”. This was at San Diego State. In 2012 the CDE launched new standards for English learners, all derived from linguistics research and practice. San Diego unified made a side run to avoid actually building and implementing a curriculum for preliterate young adults by opting to purchase Pearson’s System 44, a phonics based intervention for failed readers whose first languages are English.
Well, Ms. Perkins, you ran smack into the institutional idiocy of state departments of education, which is also a feature of large school districts–incapable of deviating from the bureaucratic rule. The opposite is the case with the management organizations of big charter organizations. They are a lawless law unto themselves. Your linguistics training is of inestimable value in the teaching of English. I, too, studied linguistics as a young man and throughout my life, and I constantly drew upon this in my textbook writing, curriculum planning, and teaching.
Vice posted today about the latest scandal involving the University of North Carolina.
It involves the non-reappointment of a UNC law professor, Prof. Eric Muller. He has been a forceful critic of a settlement that the University made with the Sons of Confederate Veterans for construction of a $2.5 mil. facility to house a confederate statue.
A Board’s primary responsibility is to protect the institution from disgrace. The UNC Board is a failure. International media informed the public this spring that the Board brought disgrace to the University on three occasions- the handling of Hannah-Jones and Eric Muller’s appointments and the wrongful influence of donor, Walter Hussman.
Since 2010, NC has been controlled by Tea Party demagogues.
Foxes overseeing the hen house with predictable carnage
Star faculty and students will avoid the school like the plague now that its reputation is in the dumpster. It’s a shame for a school that citizens sacrificed to build.
Since 2010?
That’s one long tea party
Once again, the problem with political control of education is that the politicians believe they are in control.
Interesting comment, TE. In my state [NJ], schools are mostly traditional public, and mostly run by local Boards of Ed. Towns here are notoriously ‘small’ in the sense that locals rarely give up their fiefdoms to merge (or even share services), tho we’re densely populated, so the pattern continues. In these small towns there’s little political strife over running the schools, which is probably due to residential segregation race/SES-wise.
Doesn’t mean towns are all black/brown-or-white/ richer-or-poorer. That pattern dominates, but there are plenty of intermediate towns which are 20%-30% minority/ poorer, and they seem to have little political strife over the running of schools—perhaps because they’ve long had that distribution and have learned to compromise. To me, the key is “small”: even with residential segregation, if all the kids funnel into one high school, adjustments get made down the line. Board of Ed members are mostly present or former parents of district children, buttressed by a techie &/or accountant or attorney.
OTOH, we have a dozen+ poor districts that were taken over by the state 25 yrs ago. Most are large/ urban, a few are rural/ sparsely-populated. These are the districts where politicians are in control. On the whole they’ve done a cr*p job of it. Only one—Newark— managed recently to wrest control back to a locally-elected board (thanks to the overreach of Christie/ Cerf/ Cami Anderson & Zuckerberg funding).
What do you see where you are?
I thought Republicans disliked “cancel culture”. Guess it depends who’s doing the canceling.
Cancel the Culture
“Cancel out the other side”
Something we should all abide
Cancel the opposing team
Cancel them and make em scream
Cancel neighbors just next door
Just like in the Civil War
Cancel her and cancel him
Cancel they and cancel them
Cancel everything in sight
Even cancel Friday might
Saturday’s OK to stay
That’s what Elton John would say
Critical Race Theory added coin and credit card slots on bathroom stall doors.
Critical Race Theory designed Clippy the paperclip.
Critical Race Theory is head of education policy at the Bilious and His Ex Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates theme song
“All my exes don’t pay taxes”
Speaking of which, Biden’s AG is now investigating to find out who gave the tax info (or more accurately, the lack of tax info) on the billionaires to ProPublica — presumably so they can throw the book at the whistleblower.
Can’t have those damned whistleblowers revealing that billionaires pay no taxes, now can we?
lol
Bilious Gates. Perfect.
Best thread I have read in a very long time! We’ve got to keep the humor and reality of it all together. Because we are all together.
An example of American injustice-
The photo array of the UNC’s Board of Governors which includes Art Pope shows 15 white men, 4 white women, two black women (one of whom is a Republican) and two black men. Only one person on the appointed Board identifies as a Democrat.
The people are fighting back for a fair and independent public university system, one that they sacrificed to create and one that is not legacy admission-
1,619 UNC alumni and students signed an ad that appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer. It backs Hannah-Jones.