Tom Petruso was first to give me a heads up on this by e-mail, subject: "Idiocy Of The Day." Here it comes again ---
New York State: English Lit considered harmful.
The NY State school-board has been sanitizing its tests, removing all references to age, race, hate, religion, and, it seems, acrimony in the excerpted reading-portions on its standardized English exams. It wants to make sure that students aren't made "uncomfortable" by the readings. The living authors whose works are excerpted are understandably livid, as are parents and everyone who gives a damn about good writing (which lets out NY State's educational bureaucracy, I'm afraid):
Certain revisions bordered on the absurd. In a speech by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, in addition to deletions about the United States' unpaid debt to the United Nations, any mention of wine and drinking was removed. Instead of praising "fine California wine and seafood," he ends up praising "fine California seafood." In Carol Saline's "Mothers and Daughters" a daughter no longer says she "went out to a bar" with her mother; on the Regents, they simply "went out."
In an excerpt from "Barrio Boy," by Ernesto Galarza (whose name was misspelled on the exam as Gallarzo), a "gringo lady" becomes an "American lady." A boy described as "skinny" became "thin," while another boy who was "fat" became "heavy," adjectives the state deemed less insulting.
(New York Times) [via bOing bOing]
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