Harry Potter: Good or Evil?

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Recommended: The Value of Children’s Literature

Harry Potter: Good or Evil?

Throughout adolescents, a child is taught to use his or her imagination. A child is read stories of a talking cat or a silly old bear while still young and naïve. The child is read such stories to encourage use of his or her creativity. The ideas of such characters are for pure amusement and are obviously fictional. Unfortunately, today there are issues of censorship that stifle a person’s creativity. The most recent book being criticized by censors is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Censors claim that the reading of such novels encourages witchcraft, and therefore should be banned. Although critics of the Harry Potter series are well intentioned in their ideas of banning this novel in schools, the actual banning of the novel is far more destructive. What these critics fail to recognize is that the reading of such an imaginative novel allows for children’s creativity to flourish, rather than allowing them to turn to negative forms of entertainment. The banning of certain novels in schools is extremely important in today’s society, but only when the novel is destructive to a child’s upbringing.

In past history, such classics as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye have been banned. Critics justified their actions by stating that such novels are inappropriate for school age children. Critics have now targeted the highly creative Harry Potter series. At the beginning of the school term the American Library Association was bombarded with complaints from parents about potentially harmful content in the series. Unfortunately, opinions vary and there is no simple answer. Although citizens of the United States are given the right to Freedom of Press under the First Amendment, this does not allow schools to incorporate every piece of literature within the curriculum. Schools are torn because as Linda Harvey states in “USA Today”, “No school includes everything. Few public schools would accept books advocating drunken driving, bulimia or rape. And it’s rare to find novels in school libraries about teens who proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ” (Harvey). Reading material that encourages such horrendous acts as drunk driving and rape should be the focus of the countries problems, rather then a child’s fantasy series that only encou...

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...children to communicate with furniture.’ And we all know where that can lead, don’t we” (Blume)?

Works Cited

Blume, Judy. “Is Harry Potter Evil?” The New York Times. 22 Oct. 1999. 17 Nov.

2000 http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe.

Cain, Michael Scott. “Crazies At The Gate.” Portals Reading, Writing, and Critical

Thinking. Eds. Mary T. Segall and William R. Brown. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. 599-608.

Harvey, Linda. “Protect our Kids.” USA Today. 6 Sept. 2000. 17 Nov. 2000

http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe.

Plato. “On Censorship of Literature for School Use.” Portals Reading, Writing and

Critical Thinking. Eds. Mary T. Segall and William R. Brown. Fort Worth,

Texas: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. 586-589.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Scholastic Inc, 1998.

Schmidt, Dominic. “Choice, Not Censorship, Is the Issue Over ‘Harry Potter’ in School.”

Los Angeles Times. 7 Nov. 1999. 17 Nov. 2000 http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe.

“Harry Potter faces biggest foe yet in book censors.” USA Today. 6 Sept. 2000. 17

Nov. 2000 http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe.

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