Went to Books and Coffee last night. The review was by Lucien Ellington, an education professor at UTC. He reviewed Diane Ravitch's The Language Police. It was a good review, but the disgussion was more interesting. You had a lot of interesting characters, particularly Chattanooga intellectuals with chips on their shoulders. The more I see of it, the more UTC looks like this refuge for political conservatives that have been forced out of mainstream academia for their political views. I've met several professors now that all have that similar story to tell.
The book is about the un-democratic, anti-capitalist way the textbook publishing industry works. The industry self-censures their work based on several sensitivity criterion. These criterion are complex and convoluted, so I'll spare you, but they basically work out to exclude things like brithday cake from literary stories, and depiction of anyone in a traditional roles, they basically go so far as to eliminate any normative education from our education in the humanities.
Ravitch blamed this on the industry. I thought that this gives the industry to much credit. In my mind it seems much more likely that the industry is just reacting to our vague notion of tolerance that we holf so dear. Strongly held, vague beliefs, tend to work themselves out in unexpected ways like this.
Posted by matt at November 5, 2003 1:56 PM | TrackBack