Story Archive

Historical Ignorance II

Michael Roberts, the principal of Washington High School in Pensacola, Fla., has ordered the teacher of a 9th- and 10th-grade summer reading program to stop using a book because it “is about questioning authority” and, worse, describes that “as a positive thing.” The book: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, which is about teens who fight the government’s chipping away of the Bill of Rights after a terrorist attack, an obvious extension of George Orwell’s concept of a “Big Brother” continuously watching over citizens. In e-mails released to the media, Roberts says Doctorow is “an outsider to the George W. Bush administration.” The teacher, Mary Kate Griffith, who is the head of the school’s English Department, “told him I reported him” to the National Coalition Against Censorship. There is a review procedure to challenge books, but Roberts didn’t follow that procedure, she said. “The whole idea that one person [saying] no, whether it was another administrator or teacher or parent, isn’t right.” (RC/Pensacola News Journal) ...It sounds like the teacher is “challenging authority.” Good.