Down With This Sort of Thing

It's Religious Correctness gone mad! Normally you see the headline 'School Bans Harry Potter' and you think that it originated in some place in the USA where opposable thumbs are considered a recent innovation, but no, blast my prejeudices, this is about the head teacher of a primary school in Chatham, Kent.

According to this BBC News item date-lined 29th March 2006, Carol Rockwood of St Mary's Island Church of England Aided school is "banning pupils from reading the best-selling Harry Potter children's books because she says they go against the Bible's teachings."

Now, I'm not a great Harry Potter fan by any means, but any book that encourages kids to read (and many adults too I believe) is okay by me. Alright, maybe if they were being fed Janet & John versions of Mein Kampf I might have an issue, I'm not that liberal. But what could possibly be harmful about an adventure romp that is Bunter's Greyfriars crossed with 'The Wickedest Witch'? If I could summon up any objection it would be from the disturbing fact that the application rate for boarding schools in England has gone up as children want to go to a Public School like Harry and Hermione. I'm sure they know that sports activities are more likely to be lacrosse than quidditch, but still.

Over to Ms Rookwood for an explanation of her ban:

"We are a Church of England aided primary school which means the church ethos is very important to what we do.

"The Bible is very clear and consistent in its teachings that wizards, devils and demons exist and are very real, powerful and dangerous, and God's people are told to have nothing to do with them."

Hmm, okay. So yes, the first five books of the Old Testament do have references to witches, soothsayers, wizards, necromancers and the like (e.g. Exodus 22:18 "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"), but this was written in a very different age for a very different culture. For example, Exodus 21:2 & 7 tells us that if we "buy a Hebrew slave, he shall be your slave for six years, but in the seventh year he shall go free and pay nothing . . . When a man sells his daughter into slavery, she shall not go free as a male slave may." I don't think Ms Rockwood would advocate introducing slavery into the Home Counties because that's what the Bible 'teaches' us.

In the time since the Penteuch was written, we've had a few major culture shifts, not least The Reformation and The Enlightenment and The Age of Reason. We're all a bit less scared about the world now, and we know how to manipulate it using scientific principles rather than mumbo-jumbo. We've also had Romanticism in literature and art which introduced the aesthetic of thrilling the reader/viewer with supernatural folk-lore from our past. Surely JK Rowling is continuing the Romantic tradition of sorcery, of good and evil, of nature and wildness, that started with writers such as Goethe with his 'Faust', though perhaps with a nod to Enid Blyton's 'Famous Five'.

I just wish I could ask Ms Rookwood if she is also banning Barney the Purple Dinosaur on the basis that dinosaurs (of any colour) are not mentioned in the Bible. Or does she accept that Creationism is now superceded by Evolution, just as beliefs in magic and demon spirits have been superceded by the scientific method?