THE STATE EDITS THE CLASSICS.(The New York State Board of Regents edits Anton Chekhov's work for a public school essay test)

In 1887, Anton Chekhov said in a letter to Maria Kiselyova that the writer "should . . . acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones." Such strength of stomach is not shared by the New York State Board of Regents, which oversees the tests that every New York public-school student must pass in order to graduate. Last summer, the Regents chose to include Chekhov's short story "An Upheaval" on the English exam, requiring students to refer to it in writing an essay on "the meaning of human dignity." The Regents felt it necessary to shovel some of Chekhov's more pungent details out of this story, which concerns the theft of a brooch from an upper-class home: gone is the humiliation that the mistress of the house forces upon her servants ("They stripped us all naked and searched us" is in Chekhov's text but not in the Regents' version) and gone is the suspected governess's fear of being "searched like a street walker."

These edits were apparently made in accordance with the State Education Department's Sensitivity Review Guidelines, which are intended to prevent any injury to the sensibilities of the testees through exposure to risky works of literature, and which state that test questions must be examined for racial, religious, or gender stereotypes and should conform to a whole raft of other sensitivity considerations. (The current guidelines can be found on the S.E.D.'s Web site.) Admirers of Chekhov and other authors similarly bowdlerized might detect a whiff of the barnyard in the Regents' editorial judgments: in a test from three years ago, an excerpt from Ernesto Galarza's memoir "Barrio Boy" was altered so that the author, in describing two of his friends, speaks not of "a skinny Italian boy" and "a fat Portuguese" but, rather, of "a thin Italian boy" and "a heavy Portuguese," in accordance with the S.E.D.'s concern that test materials should not "degrade people on the basis of physical appearance." (Galarza is also not allowed to refer to the sensitivity guidelines enforced by his own school: "We were sure to be marched up to the principal's office for calling someone a wop, a chink, a dago or a greaser" was altered to read, "We were sure to be marched up to the principal's office for calling someone a bad name.") Two years ago, in a selection from "Stop-Time," Frank Conroy's memoir about his boyhood, a passage about a swimming outing--"It was easy to undress. We wore only blue jeans. I remember a mild shock at the absence of anything but air against my skin"--was cut, presumably because it violated the S.E.D.'s injunction against presenting "sexual innuendo." There is a guideline outlawing texts that "present inflammatory or highly controversial themes such as death, wars, abortion, or ...