Little Brother

Why teach Little Brother?

Little Brother, a novel by Canadian author Cory Doctorow, depicts the fight of a San Francisco teen against the policies of a government reeling from a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge and Bay Area subway system. This provides the foil for Doctorow to explore the expansion of the surveillance and security states since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Books can be like time machines. They can bring us back to events and feelings long after they’ve happened. They can also be like experience machines, helping us to understand things we didn’t live through. The 9/11 attacks are one of the most important contemporary events that shape our public policy, but high school students today may not have appreciated the events as they happened, if they remember them at all. Little Brother provides an opportunity for students to imagine the feelings and fallout from such an event and explore their beliefs about the trade-off between freedom and security.

Students can build empathy for those who put the policies of the post-9/11 world in place and explore whether those policies are appropriate today and how they believe we should proceed. Fiction allows the discussion to escape the politically charged world of reality.

Similarly, the novel also presents opportunities to discuss racism, privacy, civic responsibility, the ethics of whistleblowing, a comparative discussion of Canadian law, and recent Canadian history.

Little Brother can be taught as an alternative to George Orwell’s 1984 as it covers many of the same subjects in a more contemporary context and is written by a Canadian author.