Last spring a Brooklyn mother named Jeanne
\nHeifetz noticed something fishy on New York state’s standardized high-school
\nEnglish exam: an excerpt from
\na book she’d once read had been altered. Her curiosity piqued, she gathered
\n10 exams from the past three years and discovered that most of the literary
\npassages had been expurgated. References to race, religion, sex and other hot
\ntopics had been removed or softened. A "fat" boy had become "heavy," a "gringo" was
\nnow an "American," and a childhood memoir about visiting "the
\nNegro section of town" had been stripped of racial content. Elie Wiesel’s
\ndeclaration that "Man, who was created in God’s image, wants to be free
\nas God is free" had been reduced to the lifeless slogan: "Man wants
\nto be free."<\/p>\n
Faced with public outrage and mocking headlines ("The Elderly Man and
\nthe Sea?"), state officials quickly promised to end
\nthe practice. But nothing about the episode surprised Diane Ravitch. As she
\nnotes in "The
\nLanguage Police," the educrats in Albany were just following the rules
\nof their trade. Like test-makers and textbook publishers everywhere, they had
\nsubjected their exams to the scrutiny of professional "sensitivity reviewers." The
\nmandate of these red-pencilers? To "eliminate, delete, remove, replace,
\nrevise–that is, censor–offensive material."<\/p>\n
On the theory that a proper K-12 education should upset Here are some other suggestions:<\/p>\n Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Northerner in Unelected Ruler Arthur’s Court <\/p>\n Leo Tolstoy’s Master of Men and Women<\/p>\n Leo Tolstoy’s Peace and Peace<\/p>\n Herman Melville’s Moby Richard<\/p>\n Ernest Hemingway’s The Geriatric in dire need of free prescription Fyodor Dostoevsky’ Crime and Rehabilitation<\/p>\n James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Developing Adolescent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last spring a Brooklyn mother named Jeanne Heifetz noticed something fishy on New York state’s standardized high-school English exam: an excerpt from a book she’d once read had been altered.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nno one and affirm all, elaborate protocols now exist for the content of classroom
\nmaterials.
\nMs. Ravitch, the country’s soberest, most history-minded education expert–and,
\nin this case, a whistle-blower extraordinaire–fills her book with one outrageous
\nexample after another (sometimes, alas, to the point of repetition). Especially
\nuseful is her appendix titled "A Glossary of Banned Words, Usages, Stereotypes,
\nand Topics." Printed in single-spaced small type, it goes on for 32 startling
\npages.
\n[Full
\nStory<\/a>]<\/p>\n
\ndrugs and the Sea<\/p>\n