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Losing Our Language:How Multic: How Multiculturalism Undermines Our Children's Ability to Read, Write and Reason

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Sandra Stotsky performs a great service by demonstrating how our schools now fail to teach children how to read and write. We need to be reminded of the gravity of that failure, of course, and efforts to understand not only its consequences but its causes are long overdue. In where she fixes blame, however, Ms. Stotsky limits her focus badly. She points the accusing finger almost exclusively at the multicultural movement. In their effort to pursue "social and political goals" to the neglect of academic ones, she argues, multiculturalists in the education establishment have brought about literacy's decline.

By insisting on that cause alone, though, she brings too narrow a view to a problem that is as broad as it is complex. As a college English teacher with 40 years of experience, I agree that such a decline has occurred and is serious indeed. I even share her distrust--at least in part--of many proponents of multiculturalism. They, too, bring a limited focus to language arts, and their own ideological zeal can sometimes lapse into anti-intellectual folly. But the causes of "language loss" are many and deep--some blatantly obvious, some less so, and some remaining to be determined by careful, dispassionate investigation. They range widely-- from the spread of affluence in the U.S. following World War II and the outburst of electronic technology, to rapidly changing demographics, Cold War hysteria, and an all-too-simplistic polarization between left and right on the educational front. Quite possibly, they also include the consolidation of smaller school districts into monolithic bureaucracies, the indifference of university English departments to the pre-college education scene, and even a market mentality that treats children as consumers rather than students, especially in tv commercials.

At their more insidious, such causative forces overlap in ways too easily overlooked and should be explored more open-mindedly than Ms. Stotsky explores multiculturalism as a singular agent of pedagogical change. So while she deserves to be heard for how she identifies the literacy problem, she leaves too much unobserved about why it exists. I wish she would have cast a wider net with her considerable research and reasoning skills so as to be more realistic about why we find ourselves in the literacy mess she so aptly identifies.

This is my review of Professor Stotsky's book as it ran in the Wall Street Journal of Monday, February 22, 1999

By now, we are familiar with the ways in which multiculturalism has infiltrated America's college reading lists and high school textbooks at the expense of the traditional curriculum. Less well known is what is going on in elementary schools. There, abysmal scores in reading and writing are often blamed on faulty methods, e.g., using "whole language" to teach reading instead of tried-and-true "phonics." No doubt there is a lot of truth to such claims, but it turns out that multiculturalism deserves part of the discredit, too.

As young students learn to read, they use what are called "basal readers." These collections of stories and excerpts from literature--among the most widely read textbooks in existenc--are crucial to the mastery of grammar and vocabulary. The 19th century's version was, of course, the demanding "McGuffey's Readers."

Today's versions are quite different, as we learn in Sandra Stotsky's "Losing Our Language" (Free Press, 316 pages, $26). Ms. Stotsky shows how reading instruction has fallen prey to multicultural fashion at a staggering cost to children. Because "language development is the engine that drives intellectual growth," a child's reasoning ability is the ultimate victim of the new social imperatives.

The multiculturalists seem to be aware of the importance of basal readers, if not the reasons for their importance. Over the past thirty years, they have pushed for revisions motivated by a belief that underperforming students need to feel self-esteem before they can succeed academically. (This premise has never been validated in decades of empirical research.) How will self-esteem be cultivated? Not by insisting that all students achieve at a high level (and thus earn their self-respect) but by lowering standards.

Ms. Stotsky uses some clever measurements, such as the number of challenging words in glossaries over succeeding editions. Difficult vocabulary words are now introduced at a declining rate as a student advances through the grades. Basal readers are less challenging in just about every other way too. Sentence structure and grammar have been dumbed down.

The content of the readers is distressing as well. Essential aspects of American civic culture and history are gone, making way for stories, poems, articles, and inspirational tales by and about members of various U.S. identity groups--or non-European foreign groups. In the 1993 edition of the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill fourth-grade reader, _all_ the foreign content was non-European. (Didn't this make kids wonder who's been doing all the oppressing?)

The teacher guides that accompany the texts pound the point home. The guide to a widely used reading series advises: "To help students begin to develop cultural awareness and understanding, they first need to learn who they are-their ethnicity, gender, and social class-and how they are viewed by society.... Both students and teachers have participated in relationships of domination, submission, oppression, and privilege which have helped to shape who they are and how they see the world."

Given such assumptions, it is not surprising that the new readers are peppered with difficult non-English words that children will likely never use again, such as an Indian tribe's word for "eagle" which is pronounced "WANG buhl" but spelled "Wanbli"" There is also a depressing quantity of slang and dialect, such as this patronizing specimen culled from the Houghton-Mifflin sixth-grade reader (not some 1920s minstrel show): "Shore, shore, Fannie's fetchin' more. We gotta dance.... Member, 'fore mornin' we goin' to be."

Many selections are what Stotsky calls "pseudo-literature": manipulative, didactic stories illustrating "progressive" platitudes. There are stilted narratives about Native Americans, the deaf, people with Down's Syndrome, white people's unfair advantages and so on.

Such selections are springboards for emotional explorations of prejudice and the darker periods in American history. About the World War II-era internment (in "concentration camps") of Japanese immigrants, Houghton-Mifflin wants teachers to ask sixth-graders: "How do you feel about the fact that the United States required Japanese-American people to leave their homes and live together in camps?"

A strong theme of the new reading instruction is the value of emotive responses over analytical reasoning. It's not hard to picture angry 11-year-old boys working out their "feelings" about volatile subjects--like black-white conflict--with their fists at recess.

In sum, as Ms. Stotsky writes, "the moral impulses guiding the choice of these selections in the readers seem to entail high academic costs at the level of language learning itself, especially, and ironically, for black and immigrant children."

Reading "Losing Our Language" should send parents rushing to their school board with pointed questions. At the least, as Ms. Stotsky advises, parents should take a long, hard look at what their children are being asked to read.

Mr. Hazlett is director of the Manhattan Institute's book program.

Is your child's school using a series of "literature" books, with each year's text containing a wide variety of stories? Well, take a close look. Take a very close look. Are those stories uplifting? Challenging? Do they introduce valuable new vocabulary and increasingly more complex writing? Or do they have startling high proportions of stories you've never heard from, from third world sources? Stotsky's book is a searing indictment of these "basal readers", and just how badly they have slipped in the last twenty years. They are softer, fluffier, and have less inspirational content than ever before. This is a very scary book, and I heartily recommended it.

Sandra Stotsky, a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has for over 20 years studied the cognitive and political (she prefers "civic") consequences of contemporary educational fads, as well as their historical predecessors. Losing Our Language argues that during the past 30 years the pedagogical theories and strategies used to teach children English have harmed their cognitive development by supplanting academic goals with social goals and increasingly anti-intellectual methods and materials.

Stotsky reports that contemporary English "language arts" readers misrepresent American history by refusing to tell children about great American leaders, inventors, and scientists because they tended to be white males. Thus children are given to believe that Amelia Earhart invented the airplane, and the only "George Washington" they hear of is George Washington Carver. When presented at all, white males are portrayed as despicable racists. The focus, instead, is on American Indians, blacks, and Hispanics, all of whom are presented as victims.

The editors of these readers, and the professors of education and state education commissars whose recommendations they follow, are concerned primarily with quotas for the number of politically correct readings by writers who are black, Hispanic, Indian, disabled, and so on. The quotas and ideology leave little room for exciting, new children's literature, and since classic children's literature largely comes from the politically suspect pre-1970 "dark ages," it has practically been outlawed.

Stotsky cleverly intuits that the claim of prejudice in classic children's literature (for example, by Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling) is a cover story for the source of the multiculturalists' real anger: that the stories are so bloody good! The fantasy, whimsy, and relatively rich vocabulary of the great literature children have traditionally wanted to read creates a special, private world of the imagination.

Stotsky indicts multiculturalists as seeking to imprison children in a regimented, mean little public world. The preachy pseudo-literature they force on children uses vocabulary that is a mix of leaden, abstract nouns, useless foreign terms that are often presented with no guide to pronunciation; confusing pidgin languages such as "Spanglish" and "ebonics"; and little or no vocabulary that children can build on in their future studies. Thus, at ages when children's learning should be accelerated, it is actively decelerated. And instructional guides demand that teachers lead small children in discussions of grown-up concerns such as the evils of capitalism and racism.

The impoverished vocabularies are part of a war on English, which the educationists and state education officials who run the textbook-adoption process insist oppresses black and Hispanic children. Instead of improving the teaching of English for these children, the "solution" is to destroy the English language: "Self-righteous educators have chosen to take out their professed anger at this country's social problems on the English language itself. Unwilling to engage in the hard work of helping all children learn how to read and write, they have spitefully made the English language the object of their seeming frustration because it is so vulnerable, especially in its written form. What is not clear is how these educators can be held accountable for the damage their pedagogical notions are inflicting on a fundamental biological process in human development."

Stotsky observes repeatedly that no scholarship supports the multiculturalists' pedagogical claims. Influential education researchers such as Carl Grant of the University of Wisconsin and James Banks of the University of Washington constantly refer to other "research" that supposedly backs up their outlandish claims. But no such research exists. Stotsky notes that in contrast to early twentieth-century progressive pedagogues, multiculturalists consider the mere request for factual support proof of racism.

Concluding that dodges by multicultural education professors and teachers are the result of their laziness, unconscious racism, and desire to enhance their own self-esteem at children's expense, Stotsky gives parents advice on how to regain control of their children's education.

This is an exhaustively researched, rigorously argued work. However, in her insistence on maintaining a civil tone, Stotsky has avoided telling the occasionally brutal social history from which this pedagogy derived. The Black Power and New Left movements grew into the apartheid movement of multiculturalism, which mixes notions from communism, national socialism, and caste thinking. Through affirmative action and violent "community control," multiculturalists took over both university schools of education and slum-district schools. They installed incompetent professsors and often functionally illiterate school teachers based on the color of their skin and their degree of hatred, while running off competent educators of all colors. Only then did the pedagogy and teacher guides come along to rationalize the apartheid.

The truth can be a nasty business.

I have to admit that I picked up this book to have my suspicions about what's happening to students at the elementary level confirmed. I have taught 9th through 12th grade English now for over 12 years, and I have witnessed the steady decline in my students' ability and willingness to engage and succeed at academic challenges that involve reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. As a private school teacher, I have been appalled at the pedagogical approaches of administrators and teachers who can't seem to reconcile their liberal politics and activism with the notion that they serve the elite (a word they detest). They have been more than willing to jump on the bandwagon driven by the likes of Grant Wiggins and Karin O'Neil, two education "gurus" who are foisting multiculturalism and overtly anti-intellectual approaches to history and literature into the private secondary school classroom (unbeknownst to the parents who write stiff tuition checks.) So, what I discovered in Stotsky's well researched and clearly written, if slightly redundant, material came as no surprise. What did surprise me, though, was the tremendous sense of dispair that came over me when I finished it. The problems in education really have less to do with money and materials and infrastructure than with the politics of those on the front lines. The real battle, as this book has confirmed for me, is against the hubristic intransigence of those who would right the traditional and historical wrongs of our society at the expense of all of our tradition and history...not to mention the unlucky children being subjected to this tripe. The first thing I did when I finished this book was to give it to a parent of one of my advisees who started asking some interesting questions. It made me feel a little better.

The classics of literature have been replaced with simplistic tales that fail to develop our children's ability to read, write, or think. Intellectual goals have been displaced by social and political goals and moralizing pedagogy. Details, details, details, examples and overwhelming evidence. Stotsky sends home a strong message - education's aim should be to teach children to read from the best literature available, not from the most ethnically diverse sections we can find.

Many of the harmful side effects to the current multicultural trends in education have been well documented by a host of authors. While Sandra Stotsky adequately peruses the many obvious harms of this divisive fad, she is the first whom I have encountered to also zero in on a too-often overlooked impairment caused by this divisive fad-its degradation of the English language. By analyzing the basal readers offered by five publishing houses and used almost exclusively in public grammar schools, Ms. Stotsky shows how adhering to rigid multicultural dictates has yielded a body of literature that neither stimulates young vocabularies nor stresses a command of standard English. Obsessing on the sacred cow of diversity, school-age children are regularly force-fed a bland non-chronological compilation of stories designed to emphasize the victim status of various groups. The book repeatedly demonstrates that this misplaced harping on cultural identity usually assumes that "culture" equals "victim status," a weird equation that very few parents proud of their heritage would want their children to adopt.

Among the tragic side effects of multicultural agitprop is the omission of genuine heroes whose lives could truly inspire children but who satisfy nobody's agenda. In addition to the putative aversion to white males, Ms. Stotsky shows how Helen Keller fails to pass politically correct muster. On the rare occasions when she is included, her story is subjected to perverse distortions; one author described her as "proud" to be deaf. Ms. Stotsky wisely laments, "Is Helen Keller's story disappearing because it cannot be used to indict the world in which she grew up?" Shouldn't such a charge be all the more reason to include her uplifting narrative?

Ms. Stotsky wisely stresses the complete lack of any research to support the truculent claims of multicultural proponents. No studies suggest that race-based philosophies help children learn better. Forcing non-English speaking children to sit through classes in their first language has not attested to an enhanced ability to learn English. No evidences supports the vagary that class warfare and group identity tendencies increase the much ballyhooed self-esteem of minority children (or anyone else or that matter), and nothing has ever shown salutary outcomes from stressing to various children that they are victims and to others that they are oppressors. In a brave display of realism she writes, "those who stand the most to lose the most intellectually from their (diversity proponents) subconscious racism will be the children in whose names the changes in reading instruction are taking place."

Several other thoughtful dissertations have accented these separatist aspects of multiculturalists, but "Losing our Language" goes a step further and shows how the diversity craze is hostile to the English language. Much of the juvenilia offered in modern day public schools substitutes politically correct gibberish for works that could stimulate a child's vocabulary. Linguistically hybrid stories are frighteningly commonplace based on the many flaccid passages Ms. Stotsky cites. Included are stories for 4th through 6th graders that feature alarmingly high volumes of Spanish, Japanese, or Swahili words. A familiarity with even the most basic Swahili is not a terribly high requirement for most productive United States citizens, nor is this exceedingly rare dialect the first language of many children in America (or anywhere else in the world) in the twenty first century. Even when the stories avoid bilingualism, a push to use foreign proper names is utilized in these readers. She sites characters or place names like Maizon, Eliscue, Emeke, and Quito Sueno as hard to pronounce examples that children will probably never encounter outside of an agenda-heavy classroom.

This volume is a caveat that we should not let the intricate English language be supplanted by the sectoring cant of multiculturalism.

I thought I knew what educators meant when they said they wanted reading materials that were both `authentic' and `inclusive'. It all sounded so very good. Good, that is, right up until I found out what is really being taught.

I always wondered why our students are learning less than we did when I was in school years ago. I have long been wary of educator's explanations for students' poor performance; their reasons seldom ring true. Stotsky's well supported data reveals the declining intellectual expectations that ferverent multiculturists have for U.S. students. Having read her excellent book, I have concluded that multiculturists seem to view social goals, which they are creating and warping, as more attainable and worthwhile for students to acquire.

I had hoped that `inclusive' materials would fit together to show children America's mosaic of cultures. Instead the students are fed culturally divisive snippets of poorly written materials, presented without context, that would otherwise be rejected for educational purposes if not for their `correct' ideaological bent. Unless improvements are made, children herded through today's educational system must come away inadequately educated, filled with faulty racial assumptions, largely ignorant of their country's history, and haunted by dark images of the `oppressive' society that they must feel they were unfortunate to have been born into.

I am still in shock. I imagine those who have proposed and supported the worst `reforms' that our children have been subjected to will feel that the author maliciously neglects theories and data, if real data can be found, that have been used to warp our schools; she doesn't catalogue many of the endless number of faux `improvements' and `new' educational discoveries proposed in journals and books. They can't, however, contradict the facts that she presents.

This book is as important as Allan Bloom's book. Well written with hard hitting commentary and backed up with examples and data. Something has gone drastically wrong with the schools and it is clear that parents need to keep an eagle eye on what passes for "history" and the truth for their childrens education.

In a world where public school teachers cannot pass an 11th grade skills assessment (as was witnessed by the 68% failure rate in Massachusetts that resulted in recalculating how the test was scored rather than hiring good instructors), and where bilingualism is interpreted not as a means of moving children from spanish, chinese, or vietnamese to English, but as protecting the disenfranchised from the hegemony of the oppressive classes, Sandra Stotsky's book shines the light of truth upon the lies, half-truths, and misinformation the public has been fed from the same elite media and unions that have protected their power over the welfare of the children for years.