I was taught at church that that was not good. As the Harry Potter books by the Scottish author J. K. Rowling continue their dominance of the top three slots on the New York Times best-seller list, the same kind of scene is playing out at a smattering of schools across the nation, with challenges to the books filed in at least eight states in the last month. Educators eager to seize the opportunity to develop a love for literature among their students are tangling with a few parent protesters who want to yank the books from libraries, or at least stop them from being read in classrooms. From South Carolina to California, school-district committees are reviewing the three books in the Harry Potter series, promising parents like the Poliners a public forum for their complaints, though no one who is tracking the issue knows of any place that has banned the books. It is confounding to many educators that after a decade of despair over a generation lost to video games and television, the very books that have lured huge numbers of elementary and middle-school children to the printed page are themselves being denounced as dangerous.
Children compete to see who can get the next one the quickest.
I just hope it spreads to other kinds of reading materials. In their formal complaints asking school districts to remove the materials, parents argue that since witchcraft is a religion, books about it do not belong in public schools, and they say that Harry's flirtations with death and disaster are troubling story lines in light of recent school shootings. Parents in Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina and Georgia have also complained about the books. Judith F. Krug, director of the American Library Association's office for intellectual freedom, does not deny that the chronicles of Harry's years at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are all about the battle between good and evil. Sometimes you can actually picture yourself with these characters, like transferring worlds.