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I've just stumbled upon this article - and article which describes how American standardised testing has stripped all the 'politically sensitive' words from the passages that students are supposed to comment upon, and I was so appalled that I thought I should bring it to everyone's attention.
In a feat of literary sleuth work, Ms. Heifetz, the mother of a high school senior and a weaver from Brooklyn, inspected 10 high school English exams from the past three years and discovered that the vast majority of the passages — drawn from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anton Chekhov and William Maxwell, among others — had been sanitized of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity and just about anything that might offend someone for some reason. Students had to write essays and answer questions based on these doctored versions — versions that were clearly marked as the work of the widely known authors.
Now I want to make one thing clear - I've always felt that the phrase 'political correctness' and the charges of censorious 'appropriateness' were always used by the right in an attempt to undermine a generally intelligent and sensitive approach to human decency and rights - ie. that groups should be able to self-name wherever possible, that all people should be addressed with respect wherever possible.
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.
The groups, which plan to hold a news conference tomorrow, condemned the editing as intellectually dishonest and a form of censorship that distorts the content and meaning of the works. "Testing students on inaccurate literary passages is an odd approach to measuring academic achievement," the letter said.
I'm not - therefore - going to claim that this is representative of liberal politics, nor am I going to suggest that the only (correct) alternative to this kind of politicking is the happy far-right alternative of concentration camps and mind control. But this is wrong, right? This is respecting people, this is lying to them? Surely? |
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