An Open Letter to Acorn School: How Fantasy Novels Have Shaped Our Generation
We’ve been dubbed the ‘me-me-me millennials’, the ‘children of 9/11’ and ‘generation Harry Potter’, but one head teacher, based in Gloucestershire is most concerned with the latter definition.
Terry Pratchett, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, head teacher Mr Whiting has claimed, encourage ‘difficult behaviour’, cause ‘brain damage’ and are behind the recent rise in diagnosed mental illnesses in children.
I’m not going to tackle the incredibly offensive and misguided comments Mr Whiting made on mental illness. However, this strange, almost medieval, concern with the ‘demonic’ themes of fantasy novels deserves a much more in-depth defence than it has received so far.
It may come as a surprise to the head-teacher of an expensive independent school, but children are not innocent beings who can be easily protected from corruption by a firm ban on all morally-ambiguous books and TV shows.
Children do not have ‘sensitive subconscious brains’. Children live in hardship. They listen to their parents arguing, they go through family divorces, they are abandoned, adopted, abused. They develop eating disorders and are bullied. Outside of the world of education worth thousands of pounds a year, mental illness is not the only problem affecting children that is on the rise; so is child poverty. The number of children using food banks. The number of children watching as their parents are forced to choose between heating or food.
Fantasy, unlike Romanticism, allows children to escape. Time and time again, I have heard from friends, family and strangers that the books they read as a child have saved, or changed their lives. The Lord of the Rings, Robin Hobb, Michael Moorcock and Harry Potter have all been cited. Shakespeare has not. These children do not need to be taught how to see beauty in the world, they need to escape. Fantasy allows children who are struggling to keep a firm foot in this world by providing a route out of it. Children do not have imaginations limited by probability and practicality. It is a process of play, and learning like anything else, and these children often go on to write and read beyond the comprehension of most students, because their love for words is imbued, not in the nature of the world we live in, but the ones that allowed them to survive through their toughest years.
Even for the many whose childhoods might remain relatively unscathed and untouched by any nature of difficulties, fantasy still provides its many benefits. Some might say it is vital for the wellbeing of the human mind. It helps children “fill the gaps between knowledge, reality and experience and becomes a vital adult coping mechanism”. Imagination is surely, if nothing else, a rehearsal for the real world. Why else would fairy tales and strange mythical creatures be so embedded in our anthropological histories?
What kind of upper-class, sheltered world view promotes the idea that a child reading books they enjoy is in any way bad? We are lucky enough to live in a country with relatively high literacy rates, and a child who can read their way through The Lord of the Rings is a child who can read better than I can. Whether they are picking up Twilight, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Hamlet or The Hunger Games, your child is exploring the worlds that they want to explore, and that is something to be celebrated. Mr Whiting’s disapproval is especially ironic when considering a previous post of his, complaining that children are losing their ‘individuality’.
However, It’s not just children and parents that this teacher has taken a swing at; Mr Whiting has also previously declared that “teenagers rule their parents!”. They now drink, if they want to! They smoke, if they want to! They vandalise the streets, terrorise police, and do whatever they might please.
But life is not literature. It is not Harry Potter, no, but it is also not Wordsworth and Keats. Life as a teenager is not even The Catcher in the Rye. Children are not exoskeletons defined by their literary habits. They might be small, but they are still complex human beings. If Mr Whiting would like to understand the children of today’s generation, let’s take a short break from the New York Times bestsellers list and look at the facts.
Teenage pregnancy and abortion has been on a steep decline since the 1960s. In the last decade, the number of teenaged pupils trying drugs has halved, and the number of teens who consider themselves regular smokers is down by two whole thirds. The number of young people drinking has dropped for the first time since the 1950s, as has the number of those being arrested for violent crimes. On the contrary to his seemingly wacky views about teenaged habits, this generation is by far one of the most sensible of the past fifty years.
So what are we doing instead? Young people are the biggest demographic leading peaceful protests against injustice. They are the biggest supporters of progressive politicians like Natalie Bennett, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. They are the forefront of a left wing revolution. They popularised crowdfunding, legalised gay marriage and have the largest percentage of vegetarians and vegans — ever. They’re fiercely committed to community service, more likely than senior citizens to donate to charity, and increasingly sceptical of public office. They engage with the institution because they want to radically change it. They are more team orientated, they are less judgemental, and they are more concerned with the importance of their work than the pay check that comes along with it.
But, why? Perhaps these millennials have become jaded with mainstream politics and the self-interest of generations before them. Or, perhaps, they have learned from their favourite fantasy books — a genre so often inundated with moral and religious messages- that there is more to life than mortgages and money. Books like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are heavily pressed with lessons on justice and peace, and maybe the cultivation of imagination and fantasy that these books allow have bred a generation that is daring enough to dream. To dream of a world that goes beyond what is practical, and instead, strives for what is right.
Children are not little porcelain figures that you found on the shelves of your grandmother’s glass cabinet. They are born with the full spectrum of human emotions. They are not toys, they are not celestially innocent beings, and they do not need to be coddled to the point of asphyxiation. They are people. They might be small, they might be funny, they might be naïve, but they are still complex human beings, and they deserve more than the tired old-mantra of being “seen and not heard”.
It is this obsession with British reserve, with children being taught to bottle their emotions, with children being innocents who need to be protected, whose cheeks should be pinched and crocodile tears laughed at, whose emotions should be invalidated because they are small and learning, that more likely contributes to an epidemic of mental illness than any of the books attacked by this independent school.
If Mr Whiting is so passionate about treating children as if they were china dolls, to be seen and not heard, children who are allowed to listen and not feel, perhaps he should instead hope that one of these ‘brain damaged’ kids, who grew up reading fantasy novels, takes a page out of the books of H.G Wells, and invents a time machine so that he can be transported back into the Victorian era where he so clearly belongs.
