ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

A recent AP article featured a story about an English teacher who was placed on paid leave and who faces possible criminal charges after some parents complained to police that a 9th grade class reading list contained Cormac McCarthy's CHILD OF GOD, a novel about a murder who is also a necrophiliac in relation to his victims.

Hundreds of parents attended a school committee meeting complaining of the teacher's assignment, evidently ignoring the fact that the reading list was compiled by all of the school's English teachers for a pre-Advanced Placement class.

I have several problems with this whole episode.

1. Why would parents complain to the police? Why would they not go to the English department chair and then, if necessary, to the principal, the superintendent, the school committee? Why would they not see it as a school issue rather than a criminal issue?

2. Why would the English department assign such a book to a reading list, especially a reading list for underclassmen. Including the 1974 novel about a man who is falsely accused of rape, begins killing people, and then lives with his victim's decaying bodies in a cave demonstrates a lack of good judgement by the department.

3. Why would the principal's approval of the reading list not be mandatory? S/he is responsible for the school and for all its machinations? By-passing the principal is highly questionable.

4. The entire process of creating, publishing, and implementing a student reading list is a complicated social and intellectual process that should involve students, teachers, parents, and administration. If such a process were in place, I doubt that this issue would have arisen, and a third-year teacher would not have become a target for angry parents and a scape goat for administrators and politicians.