By Jim Trelease
© 2001,
2007 Jim Trelease / updated:
7/23/08
Who will pick the censors?
 his might be a good time to mention the irony of how
many times the people who elect themselves as censors
or the conscience of education turn out to have feet
of clay, never mind dirty hands. The epitome of this
is former Secretary of Education William
Bennett. A self-proclaimed
authority on family values and virtues (The
Book of Virtues),
Bennett set himself up as an authority on what is right
for kids and families to read. No problem there.
 Bill
Bennett
But then Bennett
turned out to have one of the Beltway's healthier gambling
habits, losing more than $8 million in Vegas over a decade
(including $550,000 in one weekend at the Bellagio).
But it wasn't the slot-habit alone that made Bennett
a hypocrite. As
Frank Rich pointed out in The
New York Times (Arts & Leisure,
May 18, 2003, "Tupac's Revenge on Bennett"),
his track record for double-standards is a lot better
than his record for beating the odds on The Strip:
- When Bennett excoriated Time
Warner for its promotion of "gangsta
rap," he somehow forgot to mention his own contract
with Time Warner's "Book of the Month Club" that
netted him six figures.
- Bennett and Newt Gingrich were
among of the loudest critics of public television
as a waste of public tax dollars but he later
grabbed more than a few of those public dollars when
he sold his Book of Virtues to PBS
as a cartoon series.
- Twenty years after he was happy
to win a $970,000 grant for the National Humanities
Center in North Carolina when he was its local director,
he was joining the conservative chorus in calling for
its demise, finally knocking down the fund by one-third.
- When he went before
Congress to excoriate the various media moguls who
allow violence and depravity to flourish in our society,
how is it he failed to mention Rupert
Murdoch whose
Fox network consistently seeks the bottom of the
cultural food chain? Yes, Murdoch's team at Fox News
backs Bennett's political party all the way.
FOX NETWORK: Fair and balanced
on moral values?
No one sang a louder chorus of the "Moral
Values" in the opera that was called the 2004 election
than Murdoch's News Corporation. And there was no group
more duplicitous among either the Democrats or Republicans
than Fox. Consider this post-election note from The
New York Times' Frank Rich:
If anyone is laughing all
the way to the bank this election year, it must
be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite,
Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center
within his News Corporation, and each red-state
dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the
rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio.
The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books
like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like
a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How
to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been
synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox
News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless
to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun
parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby
to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an
encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring
its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.
Almost unnoticed
in the final weeks of the campaign was the record
government indecency fine levied against another
prime-time Fox television product, "Married
by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere
bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than
twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet
Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction."
— FRANK RICH
"On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide,"
The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2004 |
If you add the items
detailed by Frank Rich to the bizarre employee-employer
accusations against Bill O'Reilly (settled
out of court), one must wonder: Are these the people
America wants setting the standards for which books
will be read by our children?
Textbook
and test censors
 o state
takes its personal liberties to the extreme that
Texas does, which is always "bigger
and better" than anywhere/anyone else. Texas, however,
wants to make sure you're not free to write or read what
some of its "select" citizens feel
is inappropriate, false, or just plain disagreeable.
With that in mind, the state has created the most extreme
textbook adoption process in America.
And since it's the
largest purchaser of school texts in the U.S., the Longhorn
state is the tail that wags the textbook dog. A host
of extreme political and religious conservatives have
hijacked the Texas process in recent years and their
reasonings and strategies are described in "Textbook
Publishers Learn: Avoid Messing With Texas," by
Alexander Stille (The
New York Times, June 29, 2002, p. 1, A19). The article prompted one Texas history professor
(University of Dallas) to write the following letter
to The Times:
To
the Editor:
Readers
should not overly fret that students in Texas
are being deprived of a full and accurate account
of American history.
Under Texas law, all students
are required to take two semesters of American
history if they attend a state-supported community
college, college or university.
Professors have
the opportunity to cover and analyze the material
that was left out of high school textbooks.
Texas
college students usually find it refreshing to
read and learn about the history that was kept
from them.
— STEPHEN G. RABE
Dallas, June 29, 2002 |
The above letter
leaves one to conclude that the majority of Texas students,
those not attending college, will remain in the land
of ignorant when it comes to the issues censored by
the Texas Taliban.
 |
Ravitch |
The impact
of groups like the Texas Taliban crowd has been profiled
in Dr. Diane Ravitch's highly acclaimed
book The
Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What
Students Learn (Knopf,
2003). Ravitch is by no means a liberal
or progressive, having served as an Assistant Secretary
of Education in George H. W. Bush's administration
and holds the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the
Brookings Institution. When The
Wall St. Journal reviewed
this book, it had this to say:
"What
has magnified the influence of activists is the hopelessly
corrupt way that textbooks and tests are produced.
Classroom materials have become the almost exclusive
domain of mammoth corporations like McGraw-Hill, Pearson,
Reed Elsevier and Vivendi, whose prime concern, Ms.
Ravitch shows, is not to educate but to avoid controversy.
Texts are composed by committees of nonspecialists
who go light on words and heavy on graphics and who
do everything with an eye to the political vagaries
of Texas and California . . ."
—Book review
by Gary Rosen
Wall St. Journal, April 22, 2003, p. D8
To hear Ravitch's interview with Terry
Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air," go to Language
Police.
In contrast to the
procedures of the Texas education establishment, the
democratic way is to provide open and fair hearings
to anyone expressing a concern about the appropriateness
of certain literature for children but the hearing
board must be balanced and autonomous enough to prevent
community bullying or hijacking.
As we've seen
throughout history and currently in the Middle and
Far East, extremism in pursuit of even religious goals
invariably leads us down a one-way street to anarchy
from which no one escapes unscathed. Had such hearings
been available to black and Jewish groups in the U.S.
during the first half of the twentieth century, many
racial and cultural injustices could not have been
perpetuated and reinforced in the literature of American
classrooms and libraries.
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