Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason

If Johnny can't read, blame the books. According to Stotsky, a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, increasingly dumbed-down elementary school textbooks have been lowering the standards of literacy in the name of multiculturalism. Culling excerpts from the nation's bestselling fourth- and sixth-grade basal readers, she argues that students in the 1990s are being fed a diet of simplistic texts studded with nonstandard dialects selected not for their intellectual rigor or their ability to ""delight the imagination"" but for their appeal to children's putative ""feelings"" about being ""victimized"" by white Western males. As a result, she claims, students, especially minorities, are not being prepared for the analytic thinking required in secondary school. Perhaps worse, Stotsky argues, they are being inculcated with potentially dangerous cultural misinformation. The excerpts Stotsky quotes are indeed ""preachy, boring"" texts with a ""relative paucity of literate words."" Her criticism of how the accompanying teacher guides pander to students' self-esteem by soliciting uninformed feelings about social issues is bold and persuasive as well. But while her arguments about pedagogy are convincing, her indictment of the current practice of ""using literature for nonliterary purposes"" is muddied by her own repeated call for textbooks that ""encourage positive civic sensibilities""; this argument opens a can of worms about what exactly ""positive civic sensibilities"" are. (Feb.)