Wednesday, April 23, 2003

PC LITERATURE

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. Her curiosity piqued, she gathered 10 exams from the past three years and discovered that most of the literary passages had been expurgated. References to race, religion, sex and other hot topics had been removed or softened. A "fat" boy had become "heavy," a "gringo" was now an "American," and a childhood memoir about visiting "the Negro section of town" had been stripped of racial content. Elie Wiesel's declaration that "Man, who was created in God's image, wants to be free as God is free" had been reduced to the lifeless slogan: "Man wants to be free."

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