Censorship in Public School and Epistemic Effects in Pedagogy

In this paper I will attempt to show how the phenomenon of censorship in public school curricula negates, or at least undermines, the rhetorical canon of Invention—specifically the epistemic function in students. Because such activities as challenging textbooks, works of art, books found in the school library, and restricting free speech are effective ways of manipulating public education, this seems to validate the transactional rhetoric of Scott, Denney, and Buck. According to Berlin (1987, p. 47-48):

The transactional relationship that defines reality also includes the social, the interaction of humans. The medium of contact between perceiver and perceived is language. Language is not, however, conceived of as a simple sign system in which symbol and referent are perfectly matched. It is instead constitutive of reality, language being the very condition that makes thought possible. Language does not exist apart from thought, and thought does not exist apart from language; they are one and the same.

Thus, “language-control” is quite literally thought-control. To put the issue in firm context, then, let’s briefly consider how censorship operates:

A Few Selected Examples of Censorship in Public School

• 18 year-old Chris Del Vecchio, a senior at Rockville High School in Vernon, Connecticut (and a registered Republican), after careful study of the candidates in a mayoral race, wrote an editorial in the school newspaper endorsing the Democratic candidate. When the Republican town committee complained, the school board established a policy forbidding student journalists from taking editorial positions (Featherstone, 1999, p.14). A 17 year-old junior at Rockville remarked, “‘It’s truly ironic for students to go from a class on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to a newspaper where they’re not allowed to express their opinions’” (ibid).

• A high school year book in Oshkosh, Wisconsin titled “Renaissance” featured Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” (from the Sistine Chapel), which caused an uproar among adults and some students, who condemned the work as “degrading and disgusting” (Anderson and Garoian, Jan. 1996, p. 35). The controversy, of course, was over Adam’s (Biblically accurate) nudity. Letters to a local newspaper called the fresco “pornographic.” One letter asked, “‘Where does art end and soft porn begin? Where does soft porn end and hard core pornography begin?’” (ibid).

• In an elementary school in Winder, Georgia the book Tar Beach by African-American artist Faith Ringgold was challenged by a parent, who insisted on its removal from the library. The parent objected to the book because it contained the word “beer” and a racial slur aimed at whites. Other library books that have been challenged include The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz, and many, many others (Boston, 1998, p.21; Ericson, 1996, p. 80).

• It even happened to me: as a senior in high school I was an award-winning graphic artist. At the time I was doing black-and-white pen and ink drawings—some fantasy based, others reality based. My art teacher, Mrs. Staffon, hung these things all over the school; one or two were even displayed in the main office. But one day she returned one of my drawings to me—a humanoid figure facing a wall—and said school administrators objected because it was a “nude figure.” This surprised me because it wasn’t intended to be a nude; it was just a vaguely human shape shown from the rear. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I had been censored.

Three Types of Censorship

Anderson and Garoian describe three types of censorship: active, passive, and self. Active censorship is when the curriculum and pedagogy of a teacher or school are publicly challenged for their “ideological, sectarian or noneducational content” (March 1996, p. 35). Each of the examples listed above are forms of active censorship. Passive censorship might be described as the indirect effects of active censorship, originating from “extremist groups and their ideological missions” (ibid) outside the classroom. In one incident in which a teacher was challenged and ultimately suspended,

An indirect yet clear message of fear was communicated to the faculty by the board of education and the school administration after the active censorship of the… teacher. Following the teacher's suspension, two other teachers in the school canceled field trips for fear of retribution. Not certain of how the content of their field trips would be perceived by their administrators, these teachers yielded their educational objectives thus subjecting their students [emphasis added] to passive censorship (ibid).

Self-censorship occurs when the academic community suppresses its own values (regarding free expression) and conforms to prevailing cultural trends. This type may almost be seen as a form of coerced orthodoxy—where someone dares not say what he or she really thinks, for fear of reprisals (or other consequences—i.e. economic hardship).

Perhaps the most egregious example of self (and indirect) censorship occurs in the area of textbook design and adoption—a subject (or national scandal) dealt with in Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Since the 1970s pressure groups from both ends of the ideological spectrum—left and right—have succeeded in forcing textbook publishers to voluntarily adopt “anti-bias guidelines” in the development of their products. That’s because half the states in the U.S. have textbook adoption boards which, coming under pressure from the interest groups, refuse to purchase textbooks containing material they consider biased against any sort of minority, whether ethnic, religious, gender-based, or geographical. These anti-bias guidelines also include language used in standardized tests. According to Ravitch, “…educational materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive. Some of the censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school” (2004, p. 3). Unlike college textbooks, which are selected by professors, or general publications, which rise or fall according to the market place, public school texts are “special creations,” designed and developed (at considerable cost) to be purchased by the state adoption boards—and this is the very thing that makes them vulnerable to censorship.

Considering the above, then, it is clear that active, passive, and self-censorship are interlocked, one reinforcing the other. Although active censorship is highly visible and attracts the most media attention, passive and self-censorship are much more insidious forms of suppression (Anderson and Garoian, ibid). That’s because they generate, at worst, an environment of fear and apprehension, and at best, a state in which intellectual curiosity is either discouraged or missing altogether. This attempt by warring ideologies to create “values-neutral” curricula, devoid of controversial material or the need for critical thinking, has disturbing implications for the cognitive development of students. That’s what I’d like to address next.

The Rhetorical Challenge Posed by Censorship

Although rhetoric is usually defined in its narrow sense—i.e. the use of language in persuasive speech or writing—and thought to be the province of the English department, it also has broader applications across the curricula. Rhetoric is inherent within all other subjects (even something as esoteric as mathematics) simply because teaching is conveyed through language. In other words, rhetoric is a property of language itself. All five canons are involved to some extent, but I’d like to focus on Invention—the development of knowledge—including the subdivisions of heuristics, epistemology, and Topoi (demonstrating propositions). The question is, what kind of an effect is censorship likely to have in the learning experience?

According to Whitson (1996) some groups are pushing for what they call “non-critical” literacy, “demanding that the public schools provide a curriculum that will teach their children how to read and write, but without challenging the student’s minds with anything that might prompt [them] to think critically about their beliefs” (qtd. in Ericson, p. 79). Consider, for example, the perennial controversy of “evolution” versus “creationism.” Although the theory of evolution has its problems (molecular biology undermines Darwin’s original conclusions) and should be presented as theory (not fact), creationism is nothing more than theology masquerading as science. Forcing creationism into a science curriculum (or, conversely, banning evolution) muddies the heuristic waters, to say the very least.
Another area of concern is the constant re-writing and revision of American or world history. According to Ravitch:

In the 1980s, American public schools became embroiled in emotionally charged debates about multiculturalism and, at the extremes, Afrocentrism. Curriculum experts asserted that traditional accounts of American history were not only racist and sexist but Eurocentric as well. Extreme advocates of multiculturalism insisted that history should teach ethnic pride, not the capacity to think analytically and dispassionately [emphasis added] about events, and they disparaged accounts of world history or American history that paid too much attention to the influence of Europe. The more extreme multiculturalists wanted to revise the history curriculum to boost the self-esteem of non-European children, and they ignored concerns about the dangers of turning history into a tool for group therapy or political action (p.136).

Thus, in history texts we get the “three worlds meet” paradigm, in which “democratic values and ideals compete with a welter of themes about geography, cultural diversity, economic development, and global relations” (ibid, p. 152). While the importance of the European ideas that gave rise to our democratic institutions are downplayed (or ignored completely), much space is devoted to “pre-Columbian civilizations and African kingdoms” (ibid). Students spend their hours learning about the Mayans, the Incans, and the Aztecs (cultures, in other words, that disappeared long before Europeans arrived) while little or nothing is said about the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, English Common Law, or any other “Eurocentric” influence that shaped America. In later publications “American Indians are no longer members of ‘tribes,’ but members of groups or nations. Slaves are now mainly ‘enslaved persons.’ Gender-specific adjectives and nouns have disappeared. The word man no longer is a synonym for humanity. There are no ‘Founding Fathers,’ no ‘brotherhood of man’” (ibid, p. 155). The result is too often a confusing mush that leaves students with precious little knowledge of the nation’s actual history—the good and the bad.

The common sense notion that censorship can—and indeed must—undermine the epistemic function of education is underscored by the fact that innovative pedagogical approaches can also be derailed, inadvertently, even in the context of free exchange and open debate. For example, Nystrand and Graft (2001, p.479) report the results of their research wherein a group of 31 seventh graders were instructed in the process of argumentative writing (forming a thesis and supporting it with empirical evidence). The instructor, Sally Martin, was a well-prepared, professional, and highly regarded English teacher. Therefore, “…her students continuously wrote and rewrote; she often responded to drafts, not just final copies; and revision was an expected part of every major assignment” (ibid). Nevertheless, after exhaustive and detailed instruction over the course of nine weeks, the students persisted in producing “hybrid” texts—i.e. argumentative theses followed by, but not always supported by facts. To account for this unexpected failure, Nystrand and Graft concluded:

Martin, like most teachers, had to negotiate sometimes conflicting demands, including a large multi-skill-level class; parent, school, district, and statewide expectations; and, on a day-to-day basis, limited time—so much to do, so many people to serve. In the final analysis, these complex negotiations configured a classroom epistemology that, in the end, favored efficient recitation, recall, and a mastery of givens, inimical to vigorous discussion and argument (ibid).

In other words, we see a breakdown of pedagogical aims due to extraneous influences—student’s previous learning experiences (the writing of reports), the omniscient tone of textbooks that present skewed narratives as givens and not subject to critical analysis, the various and sundry expectations of off-stage actors (parents, administrators, etc.), and the old conundrum of writing to please the teacher (and get a passing grade) rather than to develop new knowledge. Throw the pervasiveness of censorship into the mix, which, as discussed, has permeated public education since the 1970s, and a picture emerges of an educational system that is “inimical to vigorous discussion and argument”—that is, to rhetorical Invention.

Conclusion

Although Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” censorship means to deny the available means; as if one were to confiscate a carpenter’s tools, making it difficult, if not impossible, for him to succeed in his craft. Hariman (1998, p.10) seconds the Aristotelian view: “Rhetoric, we can continue to assume, is about arguments, and rhetorical knowing is the complex of cognitive skills and ethical norms suited to arguing well - that is, in a manner that both produces a reasonable consensus to resolve any specific problem while also perpetuating the process of deliberation.” Problem solving, in this context, requires both free access to information and the ability to wield it effectively. But this skill is precisely what censorship aims to shut down in public education. It is not hard to see, therefore, that the type of mind produced by such a system will be ill-prepared to deal with the challenges of higher education and the highly competitive world beyond.

References

Anderson, Albert A. and Charles R. Garoian. “Censorship in the art classroom” (part 1). School Arts, Jan 1996 v95 n5 p35(3).

Anderson, Albert A. and Charles R. Garoian. “Censorship in the art classroom” (part 2). School Arts, March 1996 v95 n7 p35(3).

Berlin, James A. (1987) Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.

Boston, Bob. “10 reasons why the Religious Right is not pro-family: a tradition of harm.” Free Inquiry, Winter 1998 v19 i1 p21(4).

Ericson, Bonnie. “The censorship crisis.” The English Journal, Jan 1996 v85 n1 p79-81


Featherstone, Liza. “Free speech: look who’s flunking.” Columbia Journalism Review, July 1999 v38 i2 p14.

Hariman, Robert. “Terrible beauty and mundane detail: aesthetic knowledge in the practice of everyday life.” Argumentation and Advocacy, Summer 1998 v35 n1 p10(9).

Nystrand, Martin and Nelson Graft. “Report in argument’s clothing: an ecological perspective on writing instruction in a seventh-grade classroom.” The Elementary School Journal, March 2001 v101 i4 p479


Ravitch, Diane. (2004) The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. New York: Vintage Books.