By Mary Best
Opinion Editor
It’s a little disheartening when thousands of kids will learn every Hannah Montana song, but will never know the meaning behind, “Life’s tough, get a helmet.” Regardless of what we watched on TV or where we came from, our similarities as kids help us bond with other kids and make friends.
Thanks to some overbearing members of New York City’s Department of Education, those kids are being discouraged to know about Halloween, birthdays, dinosaurs, aliens and pretty much everything under the sun.
Fearing the topics might provoke “unpleasant emotions in students,” the Department of Education has told companies that make standardized tests to refrain from using references to said topics and many more, according to a March 26 New York Post article.
Why? Because dinosaurs upset people who don’t believe in evolution, birthdays upset Jehovah’s Witnesses who don’t celebrate them, Halloween promotes paganism, and a bunch of other obnoxious reasons, all based on the idea that the mention of any of those words might upset someone.
That’s not even the end of it. The test questions are also supposed to nix divorce, sickness, dancing (except for the all-of-a-sudden solely respectable ballet), or anything that promotes wealth, according to the same article.
A March 27 “With Soledad O’Brien” report on CNN said a question mentioning a swimming pool might create jealousy among children or make them upset if their family can’t afford it.
I am not even sure there is an appropriate place to begin going after the city’s Department of Education for this; appalling, disgusting and controlling are some of the words that come to mind.
I do understand the desire to improve standardized test scores, but stripping them of any cultural references isn’t going to do a thing but dumb down the test. It’s not like 8-year-old Jimmy is going to be unable to complete a test because question 25 mentions a pool, which his family can’t afford to buy until next year.
I also highly doubt banning a mention of a dinosaur or birthday is going to “allow our students to complete practice exams without distraction,” according to a Department of Education spokeswoman in the same article, insisting it’s not censorship.
By draining culture references from standardized tests, aren’t department of education members also eliminating subjects that might help children better understand questions?
Not to mention, reducing the diversity of the questions is going to make it a lot harder to measure a student’s intelligence.
My favorite part about this whole argument is why the department was driven to ban topics from the test — low standardized test scores.
A troubling issue creeping in on schools all around the country, lower test scores should be a concern for boards of education, but there are bigger problems if the first plan of action is to dumb down the questions. Skipping over teacher reviews and looking at school literacy scores and going straight to editing test questions doesn’t sound like a plan for success.
Censoring cultural references is, in short, censoring America’s youth. These are all topics and issues they need to know about, and protecting them from wealth comparisons to avoid jealousy is blurring the class system that, like it or not, they live in.
The longer we seemingly protect our kids, the longer they remain uneducated and unprepared to grow up and enter society.
bestmk10@bonaventure.edu
