Think those heavy textbooks you lug around couldn’t possibly get any duller? Think again. Every so often, textbooks are rewritten, and each time, they are made a little duller. It began in the 1960’s, as a much needed and well-intended effort to screen textbooks for racial and gender discrimination. Recently, however, this effort has crossed the line into ultra-sensitivity. In this case, both sides of the political spectrum are to blame. The far-right want to remove all materials dealing with immoral behavior and nontraditional family settings. The far-left want to remove everything that could be construed as sexist, racist, and every other “-ist” you can think of. You may think that these two sides sound like they have the right idea, but you may be surprised at some of the omitted words.

Seemingly harmless words have been replaced by duller and more politically correct euphemisms because they might somehow distantly be construed as offensive to some poor soul somewhere out there. For example, you are no longer allowed to write “old” or “elderly” because that is now “ageist”. Instead, it has been replaced with “older persons.” “Yacht” has been entirely omitted because it is “elitist.” The use of “America” or “Americans” suggests geographic chauvinism, or undue partiality, and must therefore be replaced with “the people of the United States.” Among the other guidelines for textbook screenings are that women can never be shown in a role as a caregiver or be shown doing a household chores. Cake can not appear in any story because it is not nutritious, and because some children have never eaten or are unable to, eat cake. A story that is set in a mountain area apparently discriminates against children in the flatlands. Snow and the ocean are also taboo because some people have never seen either one, so therefore it discriminates against those people.

Sound absurd yet? It should. The more these books are screened and sweetened, the more boring they get. For those of you who have read “1984,” you might be seeing an alarming parallel here. In Orwell’s book, the government constantly dulled down the language into “Newspeak,” completely eliminating certain aspects of the language altogether. Instead of “bad,” one would say “ungood” and so on so as to squash creativity and therefore, resistance. Besides the fact that these books get more boring to read, kids are getting a completely incorrect image of the world. They are seeing a pretty sugarcoated land with rainbows and bunnies (pardon me, it’s not sugarcoated, because sugar is not nutritious.) They are being shown a world where the elderly jog and repair roofs on a regular basis, and a world where racial discrimination does not exist. Imagine their shock when they learn otherwise. This is a world much different from that which the children can easily access with the click of a mouse or a remote control.

Furthermore, there is no data which states that this “sanitizing” of the language in textbooks helps achieve higher test scores or advances learning. There is no research that states that if a girl is reading a story during a test in which a boy is the main hero, she will put down the test and be unable to continue. Yet, in one school district, “The Little Engine That Could” was banned because that “little engine” was male.

That’s not enough for you? How about the fact that due to this ultra-sensitivity to everything, your books will get even heavier. History books in particular will get larger and larger. This is because they are trying to include every event in history. Much of the history that is omitted from history books now is considered important to one race or another and therefore more will be included. Also, because they are including more material in the books, they are only covering the material on a very superficial level, making it more difficult for children to gain a true understanding of the topic. Not only are kids getting a very quick and shallow rush through history, but they will also never be able to grasp the magnitude of certain historical events because the textbook authors aren’t allowed to use certain adjectives. For example, you will never hear about slavery being “appalling” or the Holocaust as being “horrific,” even though both of those events were obviously so.

So there you have it. If you thought school was drab now, imagine what it will be like 10 years from now if things keep moving the way they are. Now that you have read this article, and you have this information available to you, I encourage you as a student to pay attention to the little things you read and always be aware of the “cleansing” of your textbooks.