Teacher's Bad Rowling Advice

[Morthoron]

Having majored in English Lit. for my B.A. before moving on to Medieval Studies for my M.A. (I know, could I have chosen two more frivolous degrees?), I would have to say that there are 'acceptable' fantasies in the curriculum of most schools, such as Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Beowulf, the study of Greek and Roman pantheons (which are usually relegated to Comparative Religion classes), and, of course, the odd Shakespeare play; however, those have received the patina of legitimacy based on centuries of study. It would have been unheard of to discuss Tolkien's cosmology with any of my professors (although quite acceptable to debate his exquisite philological research regarding Beowulf, Gawaine and the Green Knight, Orfeo or Pearl).

I cannot speak for British universities, but in the U.S. the English departments are highly politicized and agendized, either left or right wing leaning dependent on their department heads; therefore, as in my case, I was more likely to be studying Kafka, Camus, Hemingway, Faulkner, Cheever, Bellow, Rand, D.H. Lawrence, etc., rather than literature I really cared for (T.H. White, Tolkien, Yeats, Huxley, etc.) because it did not fit the agenda. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath were compulsory not because they were classics of modern literature in their own right, but because of the inherent political message they inferred.

Many of the folks I knew who went on into the teaching profession maintained the ingrained ideologies impressed upon them in school, a certain political correctness I abhor, and do not deviate from the curriculums they were browbeaten with years before. A friend of mine is getting her Masters at the same university I attended twenty years previously, and I was appalled at her syllabus: it read like an extended sociology curriculum rather than English Lit. It has gotten even worse!

And so, to draw my diatribe to a close, the fantasy element in literature is indeed frowned upon and deemed intellectually inferior, or as in Tolkien's case, perhaps a bit too quaint and certainly too chauvinistic and tainted with religious symbolism for the PC palate of many teachers. As a parent of a soon-to-be second-grader, it is too early to tell what reading curriculum will be deemed acceptable when she hits 11 or 12, but I do remember a fractious school board meeting I attended where I had to defend books authored by Mark Twain that were scheduled to be removed from the library shelves. I am becoming quite leery of the U.S. educational system, but fortunately for my daughter we have already read fantasies like The Hobbit, Charlotte's Web and Alice in Wonderland, much to her delight. I hope that, like myself, she maintains that delight throughout her adult life.