LYING TO OUR CHILDREN….Via Electrolite, apparently New York is still sanitizing the literary excerpts it uses on its Regent exam:
In new guidelines, the state promised complete paragraphs with no deletions, but an excerpt from Kafka (on the importance of literature) changes his words and removes the middle of a paragraph without using ellipses, in the process deleting mentions of God and suicide.
The new state guidelines promised not to sanitize, but a passage on people’s conception of time from Aldous Huxley (a product of England’s colonial era) deletes the paragraphs on how unpunctual “the Oriental” is.
You know, I can almost sympathize with the test creators, who probably get a lot of shit from people who consider certain passages to be offensive. But that leads to the real mystery: why choose these passages at all? Out of the entire body of world literature, aren’t there plenty of excerpts they could choose that don’t include sensitive or offensive phrases?
Maybe they should pay Patrick and me to create the next test. We can fill it with inoffensive Robert Heinlein passages.
