This blog post is in response to Mark Furler's Column in Monday's Sunshine Coast Daily and the flurry of emails, commends and letters to the editor that it generated..
My letter is below.
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After reading the various letters that have been shredding Mark Furler’s column about the Harry Potter series to bits because of his stance on some of the values within the series I was motivated to write. Not because of whether or not I agree with any of the stances (I agree with Mark by the way) but because of the mechanism with which the values were delivered.
The series started off all light and fluffy, to quote my mum “you could have mistaken it for Enid Blyton”, with things named Muggles and Quiddich and platform nine and three quarters, nothing too nasty. The kids loved it, and the parents loved it because the kids were reading! Hurrah! Move on down the line about five books and you have something that was still readable but very much darker but with only two books to go you were hanging out for the end because you knew there were only two to go and you really wanted to know how it ends. You might not like what you are reading but you still do because of the careful engineering of the series.
Just look at the movies ratings, they went from being PG up to M, but the kids flocked to the latest in droves and the parents let them because they really don’t want to say no to their kids... And after all it’s just Harry Potter.
Guess we really need to have a good hard look at what we choose to expose our kids and ourselves to. Oh, and well done Mark on bringing this up!
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