PC Overboard
Your children might soon know Hemingway’s classic “The Old Man and the Sea” as “The and the,” as the words “old,” “man,” and “sea” have all been banned from textbooks because the terms are ageist, sexist, and “can’t be used in case a student lives inland and doesn’t grasp the concept of a large body of water,” respectively, according to former education official Dianne Ravitch. Now I’m a sensitive guy. I think the Washington Redskins should get a different name, and the Cleveland Indians should change their mascot from the grinning, buck-toothed, red-as-W.C. Fields’-nose-skinned Native American they currently have, but this if you’re smart enough to be reading “The Old Man and the Sea,” you’re smart enough to know what a large body of water is. The problem arises partially because textbook manufacturers are trying their damnedest not to offend either the super-left (with ageism, sexism, and religion) or the super-right (by acknowledging any sort of sexuality or the slightest amount of fallibility in American historical figures). We can’t be far from banning the word “war,” due to its emotional repercussions. And then how will we study American history?
Sadly, textbooks aren’t the only place this type of uber-censorship occurs. According to the above article:
The New York Times recently reported that National Institute of Health researchers on AIDS are not only avoiding using words like gay and homosexuals in e-mails so as not to offend conservatives in the Bush administration, they are also inventing code words.
Times journalist Erica Goode reported that one researcher was told to “cleanse” the abstract of his grant proposal of words like gay, homosexual and transgender even though his research was on HIV in gay men.
It’s enough to make me want to kick the out of the who this and their all the way to. Can’t understand what I said? Try buying a textbook in a few years.