"When you read it, the rest of the world, like reality, just goes blank. Sometimes you can actually picture yourself with the characters, like transferring worlds." - Brian Heigel, a 10-year-old discussing Harry Potter books, as quoted by the New York Times.
Part of American democracy is the opportunity to stand before your local school board and present your arguments on education policies. Elizabeth Mounce, a mother of two from Columbia, S.C., took advantage of the opportunity to complain about the series of Harry Potter books. The popular books, written by Scottish author Joanne Rowling, feature the orphan Harry, who is an aspiring wizard. The stories indulge classic themes of fantasy worlds engaged in titanic struggles between good and evil.
Although no important groups have denounced the Harry Potter series, there is a smattering of people like Mounce, around the country, upset at themes viewed as un-Christian. Actually, the source of these complaints is probably resentment. If similar stories with themes of good and evil involving Biblical characters were read in schools by teachers, like Harry Potter books are, the entire anti-religion establishment would rise in a First Amendment fury. Assuming that wizards, witchcraft, and magic are part of a Satanic religion, some erroneously conclude that Harry Potter books are religious instruction and hence not allowed in public schools.
What is lacking is critical discernment. Not every ghost or goblin story constitutes Satan worship. Just as, not every retelling of the story of David and Goliath is prostelytizing.
Bruno Bettelheim explains in Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales that part of childhood development is learning moral lessons by vicariously living out struggles, sometimes apocryphal, between good and evil, justice and injustice, morality and immorality. Through such stories children assimilate notions of courage, honor, friendship, honesty, and loyalty. In this way, the pedigree of Harry Potter books derives from works such as C. S. Lewis's, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or the favorite A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.
The small voices upset by the Harry Potter books are amplified by the press always anxious to portray people, particularly religious people, as ignorant yahoos. If you look hard enough, one can always find such cases. What is more upsetting is the self-censorship occurring in more affluent and presumably more sophisticated suburbs.
In Owings Mills High School in Howard County Maryland, one of the wealthiest and educated suburbs in the country, Principal Margaret Spicer forbade the High School drama department from putting on a production of Harper Lee's book, To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee's book is the literary equivalent of a 'one hit wonder." Nonetheless, Lee said more in her one book than other authors have in shelf full of books.
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