Losing our language

by Sandra Stotsky

Losing Our Language reveals what the once benign, now politically correct ideology of multiculturalism has come to mean for elementary school reading curriculums in the 1990s. In this book, Dr. Stotsky details the changes that have been made over the past decade in cultural content and teaching strategies used for reading instruction in elementary schools. She asserts that under the guise of an overzealous, culturally diverse agenda, intellectual and literary goals are rapidly being displaced by social and political goals and by the demands of a profoundly moralizing pedagogy. Losing Our Language discusses how, in an effort to incorporate more ethnically varied readings into children's text-books and to raise minority students' "self-esteem," basal readers have systematically been "dumbed down"; what's more, as the readers have become grammatically more simple and simpleminded, there has been a downward trend in children's analytical powers, general knowledge, and overall literacy. How