Thin Gruel

I definately see a connection between Newspeak of 1984 aand our censorship. Newspeak deletes words to basically control the population's thoughts; they are scared of what the population will think of and rebellion. The Thin Gruel article says this about censorship, "Censorship occurs when school officials or publishers...delete words, ideas, and topics from textbooks and tests for reason other than fear of controversy." Both delete words out of fear. For example ever since the Holt incident no textbook publisher is willing to pay the price if something is found offensive, so they delete everything and seem to take it to the extreme. Newspeak also deletes everything that could cause harm; an example would be when they deleted spectacular and excellent, that was also to the extreme it seemed.

Textbooks are also going so far that they are deleting true stories and stories that are historically correct. In a fourth grade test question elimination Ravitch was able to sit in on she found many readings that were deleted which seemed, to her, correct. The Blind Mountain Climber I found the most disturbing, this was deleted because of "regional bias" and another bias about how having lack of sight was a disability. This was a true story of how a blind man hiked to the top of Mount McKinley. The committy said that this was "regional bias" because not all children have seen mountains so this is unfair. It seems now that "chldren should not be expected to read or comprehend stories set in unfamiliar terrain." Now, I might be wrong but I always thought that children had the best imaginations, so why is this being taken out?

Also in the Thin Gruel article the aim of the political right is to restore an idealized vision of the past; they believe that what a children reads a children with believe is the truth. This is also what Newspeak does, it controls thoughts with limiting vocabulary so only good thoughts can be expressed.