March 10, 2010
Censorship and Reason
In 1807, Dr. Thomas Bowdler published his edition of the Family Shakespeare. This edition was his attempt at “purifying” the work of Shakespeare, removing whole lines and sections that he deemed obscene. While it served the noble purpose of making Shakespeare's work “family friendly”, it also became one of the best-known examples of censorship of classic literature. In fact, the term 'bowdlerize' is now found in modern
dictionaries.
In 1925, the Scopes Trial, sometimes known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, captivated the nation. It was a legal test of the Butler Act which made it unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals". At the heart of this case was who determined what got taught to the children of our nation's schools.
Today the question of who is deciding what your child is learning is as relevant as ever. In her 2003 book, The Language Police, author and historian of education, Diane Ravitch exposes the carefully planned and executed bowdlerization of the modern American textbook. School boards and bias and sensitivity committees review, abridge, and modify texts to delete potentially offensive words, topics, and imagery. Publishers practice self-censorship to sell books in big states. Are we sanitizing our curriculum and avoiding controversy at the expense of literary quality and historical accuracy?
This is an important question as we head down the path of standardizing the nation's curriculum standards. Currently President Obama's campaign to raise academic standards is gaining momentum. On March 10th, the nation's governors and state school chiefs proposed nationwide standards for what students should learn in English and math, from kindergarten through high school. (You can see these standards here www.corestandards.org.)
Unfortunately, one consequence of a single set of academic standards is that it will further reduce the availability of diversified textbooks as publishers aim to sell their sanitized texts not just to the biggest states but to the entire country.
It is safe to say that the debate of what gets included and excluded in American school curriculum may never go away. Curriculum content is ever-evolving and will continue to be influenced by pressure groups pushing their interpretation of what is and isn't important upon the students of America.
So the problem of what the student studies becomes secondary to how the student studies, and more importantly, how the student learns to weigh and draw conclusions from his studies.
As L. Ron Hubbard put it, “There is a difference between memorizing and rationalizing. Knowledge is more than data; it is also the ability to draw conclusions.” ('Basic Reason – Basic Principles' The Educator's Course.)
The student of today lives in an age where he is immersed in unimaginable amounts of information that is accessible more easily than ever. There is no shortage of information resources. And for every subject one can study, it's not hard to find contrary facts. Couple this with his textbooks being sanitized by forces unseen and the student's ability to reason becomes the most important thing we can teach him.
From a very early age the child must be taught to reason. When a young student asks a question that he himself is capable of answering, he can be encouraged to reason out the answer. From sounding out a word to figuring out how to build a windmill, the student must be pushed to discover his own knowledge, to draw his own conclusions. The reasoning powers the young child uses to fix a flat bicycle tire or work out the spelling of a difficult word are no different than those used to decide whether to vote Republican or Democrat.
The parent and teacher must take every opportunity to build the child's logical reasoning skills. They must understand the senior importance of the conclusions drawn from the data by the student, not the data itself.
Colin Taufer
Headmaster
