Here we go again.
‘Ban Harry Potter or face more school shootings’
A woman who maintains that the Harry Potter books are an attempt to teach children witchcraft is pushing for the second time to have them banned from school libraries.
Laura Mallory, a mother of four from the Atlanta suburb of Loganville, told a Georgia Board of Education officer that the books by British author J.K. Rowling, sought to indoctrinate children as Wiccans, or practitioners of religious witchcraft.
Referring to the recent rash of deadly assaults at schools, Mallory said books that promote evil – as she claims the Potter ones do – help foster the kind of culture where school shootings happen.
That would not happen if students instead read the Bible, Mallory said. [dailymail]
The article is worth reading the rest of, and so is this one. However, it should go without saying that banning anything is the worst thing that you can do. Banning books from a school library will not solve any situation. The next thing you know, kids will be sneaking away from their parents house to read. Oh the horror!
I was thinking about this a little bit futher today, and there has to be another side to the argument that we’re not getting. My assumption would be that the fact that you can read Harry Potter in the school library and not the Bible would probably be it. Obviously, religious text like that would be banned. Seperation of church and state would stand to reason.
The two publications, in their raw form, are just that. They are books. Their texts take on different meaning across the vast number of societies that make up the world, yet alone a tiny school district in Georgia. Just as you teach a child to read, you can teach a child to help understand that difference between wrong and right, good and bad, selfish and self-less, and so on. No one, and certainly not banning something, will do that any better.
There is also something to be said about stopping at Harry Potter. Do you ban everything by J.R.R. Toilken[wiki]? What about Phillip K. Dick[wiki]? Stephen King[wiki]? Witches and fantasy might lead us down a rabbit hole full of authors that we should wipe from the shelves, simply for telling us stories of the imagination.
When I was 13, I read The Boys From Brazil[wiki]. That freaked me out. Nazis, human cloning, little Hitlers? It was one of those rare book projects for school that I actually recall enjoying, not to mention the amount of times that I shivered from the chills it gave me. Even though the book was of fiction, I still sought to find out if cloning was even possible, which it wasn’t at that time.
And who was this Josef Mengele[wiki] guy that was in this story? There seemed to be more detail there that begged me to find out more, as I have forever been attracted to WWII history. Fact was darker than fiction when I discovered the true tales of that man. The fact is, I was inspired to learn more.
The printed word is a powerful thing. The Bible is a book that society uses to teach a way of life. There are many versions of it. There are also many interpretations of the things written inside. Not everyone takes away the same meaning, nor is it free from violence, corruption, darkness, and tales of evil. Simply saying reading that instead will not solve the problems of gun violence in schools.
I also find it incredibly ironic that a podcast called The Secrets of Harry Potter exists, and that it is created by a catholic priest. As it says on the site, “Fr. Roderick explores themes and symbols in the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling.” According to his podcast, The Daily Breakfast, he breaks down this argument of the books being pure evil and examines the connections to christian themes. Maybe Laura Mallory should subscribe.
The Bible is available in school libraries as are copies of the Torah, the Koran and, depending on the curriculum of the school, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching and sundry other pieces of religious source material.
If the Bible somehow actually isn’t available at the school it’s because of the right wing scaring school administrators with made-up stories about the ACLU and “secularists” just like they do every holiday season. The ACLU has never sued to block children’s access to religious material nor have they sued to impede children’s right to religious speech (to the contrary, they’ve sued to force schools to allow kids to, for instance, pass out candy canes with religious messages on them. The position of the ACLU is that you cannot favor one form of religious speech over another. That’s why they’ve never sued to stop prayer groups in school but have sued to stop schools from leading students in prayers).
The claim that Bibles aren’t allowed in school libraries doesn’t even make sense since school boards are generally populated by ardent Christian activists (school board meetings are boring and pay nothing-you have to be on a crusade just to stay conscious through the opening minutes). They’re the ones who ban books. You think they’re going to ban the Bible? Or, if a parent complains that the library doesn’t have a copy of the Bible that they won’t have an extra copy to donate? It’s an absurd argument to make and slanders groups like the ACLU and people like me who actually oppose censorship.
The objection people have to Harry Potter is twofold. First, these are excellent books on every level-well written, well plotted and fun as hell. They inspire kids to read and if kids read they’re gonna learn and if they’re gonna learn they’re gonna doubt and there is no room for doubt in the world of faith. Two, the books are about magic. You know there’s no such thing as magic, I know there’s no such thing as magic but people like Laura Mallory think there are actually witches casting spells and trying to control her children’s minds. Those neighbors she doesn’t trust spend their evenings summoning imps from the seven dark circles to do their bidding and pester her in innumerable ways. She objects to Harry Potter because she’s dumb enough to believe magic is real.
Maybe she should read more. I’d suggest some Bertrand Russell but that’s been banned from schools.
I think it differs from district to district. I’m sure there are certain things that are allowed in some schools that would never be allowed in others. This is the south, afterall. It’s a whole different way of thinking in the bible belt. Churches are bigger than some schools in some cases, and that can be literally in terms of number of people and/or size of the amphitheater-sized church.
That would actually make everything stand to reason as to why the bible would be in the schools, or any other religious text. Based on the articles I was reading about this topic, I was trying to examine what she might be getting at with this crusade that she is on.
If schools were assigning this for class reading, I could understand her problem with it more. If it’s simply a matter of getting the school to ban the book from school grounds, then this is rediculous. Solutions to a much bigger problem of school violence will not be solved with banning anything.
Kids of any age will find a way, if not a way finding them. Parents are the only ones who are going to make a difference. Problems like this are not solved on the macro level. What the schools do will not fix everything that goes on within a student, but a mother and/or father stands a far better chance.
I’ve heard of numerous bible study groups who have read these books as well as others, such as The Da Vinci Code, to help each other better understand the texts before rushing to judgement. Once again, yet another idea for her to take up. It’s amazing what educating yourself and creating intelligent dialog with others might do if you try it.
harry potter is the only series longer than 3 books i have ever read and i read A LOT. not much can hold my interest past three books. i never did make it all the way through the third lord of the rings….. why don’t people see these things as teaching tools instead of trying to ban something that is ‘fantasy fiction’ and as you say and I agree make people want it more and you are hilarious at the end of the first paragraph ‘the horror’.
i also have an obsession with WWII, books, documentaries, anything i can get my hands on.
I think people that say movies, tv shows & books are the cause for violence in our children have buried their oversized heads in the sand. If children watching/reading these clearly non-reality based things and are translating them into everyday situations, then the parents of these children are NOT doing their jobs. Children are easily influenced, yes. But that’s why they have parents. Their parents should be the ones teaching them the difference between things that are real and things that aren’t.
Books aren’t evil, Harry Potter doesn’t promote Wiccan beliefs, TV is not the root of all violence in children. Maybe if this woman learned to read, she’d know that. Oh, but wait, maybe she watched the TV show “Roswell” and the aliens sucked out her brain.
One of my cousins moved to Atlanta and she’s a similar nutcase now. I am pretty serious; Romanians are usually a secular bunch, so I assume this girl turned out stupid because of the culture she grew up in.
As for wicca being bad, I have a friend who’s wiccan and, if anything, her religion has armed her with a fantastic garden. If only more kids took up gardening…
My opinion is that Anglo-Saxon societies (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK) do not offer enough to its young people and do not stave off their boredom except with shopping malls. I suspect that if life became more meaningful for teens, things would be a little better.