“In ‘The Language Police’, Diane Ravitch — a historian of education at New York University and the author of “Left Back,” a 2000 book about failed school reform — provides an impassioned examination of how right-wing and left-wing pressure groups have succeeded in sanitizing textbooks and tests, how educational publishers have conspired in this censorship, and how this development over the last three decades is eviscerating the teaching of literature and history. The ‘bias and sensitivity reviewers’ employed by educational publishers, she argues, ‘work with assumptions that have the inevitable effect of stripping away everything that is potentially thought-provoking and colorful from the texts that children encounter,’ and as a result, school curriculums are being reduced to ‘bland pabulum’.”