The New York Times has a fascinating and outrageous article on how the New York State Regents Exam (taken by all graduating high school seniors) bowdlerizes literature in the name of sensitivity. Over the past three years, the English portion of the exam has both cited passages from authors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Annie Dillard, and Anton Chekhov and thoroughly distorted--or "lacerated," to use Dillard's word--the wording and the meaning of those passages. Gone are any references to race, gender, sexuality, God, ethnicity, alcohol, or even fat that might potentially offend someone somewhere; gone, too, are the heart and soul of the prose itself, which no longer means what it was written to mean and no longer sounds as it was meant to sound. Needless to say, the living writers whose prose has been butchered and blandified to suit the Board of Education's "sensitivity review guidelines" were not notified about what was being done.

A spokesperson (note my sensitive gender-neutral terminology) for the Board of Ed said that the passages were altered because writers don't write with the needs of woundable test-taking students in mind. Stating his/her belief (note my continued gender-neutral sensitivity) that no student "should be uncomfortable in a testing situation," s/he (god damn I'm correct!) went on to observe that "Even the most wonderful writers don't write literature for children to take on a test." No, they don't. Does the Regents exam want to test how well students can read actual writing, or does it want to test how well they can read canned writing that has been expressly jerrymandered to suit the exam's ideological agenda? I guess they've already answered that question themselves. The funny thing, though, is that in altering the passages, the Board of Education has undermined its own ostensible goal. It seems clear enough from the Times article that the questions students were asked to answer about the passages depended on their having access to the original, untampered prose. I quote:

"In the Chekhov story "The Upheaval," the exam takes out the portion in which a wealthy woman looking for a missing brooch strip-searches all of the house's staff members. Students are then asked to use the story to write an essay on the meaning of human dignity. ....A paragraph in John Holt's "Learning All the Time" is truncated to eliminate some of the reasons Suzuki violin instruction differs in Japan and the United States, apparently not to offend anyone who might find the particulars somehow insulting. Students are nonetheless then asked to answer questions about those differences."

If I were a student, it would make me very uncomfortable to be asked to answer questions that could not be answered. My sense of fairness would definitely be bruised by such a flagrant disregard for reasonable expectations. But this does not seem to have occurred to those who bowdlerized the exam in order to prevent it from making anybody uncomfortable.

The absurdity--not to mention the abuse--involved here reminds me of a passage from that great literary expose of institutional hypocrisy, Catch-22. Here is Joseph Heller on the soldier Yossarian's stint working as a censor during World War II:

"All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting that the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutation and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappmann, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A.T. Tappmann was the group chaplain's name.

"When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. Most letters he didn't read at all. On those he didn't read at all, he wrote his own name. On those he did read, he wrote, "Washington Irving." When that grew monotonous he wrote, "Irving Washington." Censoring the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn't censor letters. He found them too monotonous."

One wonders what the Regents Exam would do with this passage. There is sexual harassment in it, after all, and white male authors, and ignorance of white male authors, and war, and the military, and religion, and hierarchy, and parts of speech (mentioning which could be threatening to students who don't know what they are), and grammatical jihad ("Death to all modifiers"), and universalism, and homo-insensitive language (Yossarian censors with "careless flicks of his wrist"). There's also deadly parody of just the sort of activity the Board of Education engages in when it writes its exam. Somehow I don't imagine Heller would care, though, if the passage made self-appointed censors uncomfortable. Somehow, I think he would say that that is its point.