I must make a disclaimer up-front: I don't know much about pets. The only pets I had growing up were goldfish, and those aren't particularly exciting pets. About the only consistently exciting thing they can be counted on to do is die, and the intrigue of that wears off after the second or third time.
My fish also tended to have uninteresting names: Gilbert is the only one that sticks in my memory, so the others must not have been nearly as clever.
As such, I suppose it is possible that New York's standardized test makers know something about pet names that I don't. So I suppose their policy of not permitting the pets mentioned in test reading samples to have human names -- lest a third-grader be disturbed to share a name with a gerbil -- might not be as incomprehensibly brain-dead as it initially struck me.
But, given the recent track record of America's test and textbook publishers, I suspect that the brain-dead option is the better guess.
Nowadays, standardized tests and elementary school textbooks are more thoroughly sanitized than surgical tools. All tests used by public schools first wind their way through round after round of inspections tasked with removing any stories, ideas or words that might be offensive or unpleasant or unfair under any and all criteria.
Textbook publishers have in-house departments whose sole job is to censor the texts using standards that would make Big Brother scratch his head.
New York's text-sanitizing came under scrutiny these past few years when the state's Sensitivity Review Committee butchered literary excerpts used on state tests -- removing Chekhov's "highly controversial themes" and omitting the word "God" from passages by Wiesel, for example.
That committee has since been disbanded, but -- as evidenced above -- the lunacy apparently persists. The aversion to pet names is just one of the puzzling guidelines still used by test screeners, as reported this month in the upstate Journal News.
Reporters Frederka Schouten and Meryl Harris wrote: "There are other reasons to avoid pets. Mentions of dogs, for example, might trouble Muslim students because the animals are considered unclean in Islamic culture.
"Birthdays are forbidden because they are not observed by some religions. Also forbidden: Halloween costumes, pumpkins, Harry Potter, anything that smacks of the occult.
"Even dinosaurs -- the objects of ardent student devotion -- are off-limits on most tests for fear they promote the idea of evolution."
While practices like these only make the news sporadically, they are hardly isolated. Diane Ravitch, a prominent educational historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, chronicled the practices in 2003 in her wonderful but shocking book, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."
Ravitch herself discovered the issue when she served on a panel appointed by President Clinton to explore content for a possible national standardized test. Ravitch and the panel approved a series of stories for the test's reading comprehension section, only to have their selections vetoed by professional sensitivity consultants. One of the rejected stories was an article about a blind man who climbed Mt. McKinley. The story had to be removed, the panel was informed, because children from flat states might not know what mountains were, and because it was offensive to blind people to suggest that a blind person might have a more difficult time climbing a mountain.
That got Ravitch digging, and her book is an expos of the underground of educational censorship that she uncovered. Interest groups from all sides of the political spectrum lean on test and book publishers, demanding that what they see as biased material be removed from schools.
But what may have started out as a noble effort to make school materials more inclusive and sensitive has reached the point of lunacy.
For example, illustrations and photos cannot show grandmothers making cookies (that perpetuates stereotypes about the elderly) -- old people should "jog or repair the roof." Men "cannot be lawyers or doctors or plumbers. They must be nurturing helpmates." Children are never depicted as "disobedient or in conflict with adults." And cake -- because it is not nutritious -- is banned. (That's not such a big problem, though, since birthdays were already taboo.)
The consequences of this systematic whitewashing are more than trivial. At the most basic level, it is difficult to interest children in reading and other subjects if the materials they are given to learn from are so bland (think Dick and Jane but without Spot -- no dogs, remember?). Ravitch also points out that children are savvy enough to figure out that the world being presented to them at school is incongruous with the reality they know outside the classroom, and they make the very rational conclusion that what they learn inside the classroom is without value.
The sad thing is, I think the kids may be on to something.
