Minor Threat

Posted 25 October, 2007 in Censorship | 1 comment

Pop quiz: Can anyone guess in which of the fifty United States this incident occurred:

A popular English teacher has been placed on paid leave — and faces possible criminal charges — after a student’s parents complained to police that a ninth-grade class reading list contained a book about a murderer who has sex with his victims’ bodies.

Kaleb Tierce, 25, is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor after the student selected Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s “Child of God” off the list and read it.

Here’s a hint: it used to be governed by a sitting American president.

This kind of incident is not new, of course — teachers throughout North America have frequently been taken to task for giving students “inappropriate” reading material. There was a case here in Ontario a few years ago of a teacher at a Milton high school running afoul of the Halton school board for assigning his students Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.

But this is the first case I can think of in which the teacher faced potential criminal charges for allowing a student to read a book.

I wonder if the student’s parents — or any of the other adults who would prevent their children from reading — get as exercised about their kids playing Manhunter 2 or watching any of the Saw movies. I’d wager not.

(via Bookninja)