Reading Harry Potter Leads to Brain Damage, Says Principal With No Joy in His Life

Graeme Whiting, headmaster of the Acorn School in England, caused a stir over the weekend when he wrote on the school’s website that fantasy books can lead to brain damage for the kids who read them:

I want children to read literature that is conducive to their age and leave those mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world’s ‘must-haves’, contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children; yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children…

And what, pray tell, would Whiting prefer they read instead?

I stand for the old-fashioned values of traditional literature, classical poetry, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, Shakespearean plays, and the great writers who will still be read in future years by those children whose parents adopt a protective attitude towards ensuring that dark, demonic literature, carefully sprinkled with ideas of magic, of control and of ghostly and frightening stories that will cause the children who read them to seek for ever more sensational things to add to those they have already been exposed to.

Does this guy have any idea how much violence, rape, incest, cursing, and sex is in Shakespeare…?

Does he know what Keats has written?

If he’s trying to limit students’ exposure to that type of damaging material, don’t get rid of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

Get rid of the Bible.

(Image via Elena Rostunova / Shutterstock.com. Thanks to Brian for the link)