Imagination and Children's Literature
I was disheartened to read a report on Twitter from my local paper the other day about a blog written by Graeme Whiting, the Headmaster of the Acorn School in Nailsworth, titled 'The Imagination of the Child', in which he attempts to persuade people to proscribe fantastical literature for their children, claiming that it is perverting their subconscious minds and "may prevent them from moving forwards towards adulthood".
Graeme Whiting states that children "do not have thinking brains until, at the earliest, fourteen years of age" and are therefore prone to be corrupted by "inappropriate images or text that confuses their imagination", a worrying statement from a headteacher, given that it suggests that he equates Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling's writing with pornography and, even more dangerously and fallaciously, that children cannot think for themselves.
This is a man who claims to have had a passion for literature at school, but who "felt that by the age of thirty I had read all the books I wanted to read". So, not a lifelong, developing passion, then - it has mutated into the need to tell children how they must think. "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," he states, "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."
As Samantha Shannon points out in her Guardian article, he clearly hasn't read Shakespeare in a while, or Dickens, or Keats. Nor yet Tolkien, Rowling and Pratchett, whose moral codes are on clear display when you read their books.
It is reasonable enough to worry about the impact of the internet on reading, and to encourage concern and interaction between parent and child about what input they receive, but to bury that sense in the assumption that children will "certainly not be seeking sensible literature, but will almost certainly follow the masses, the modern trends" by the time they're teenagers discredits any argument he may put instantly.
"Leave [the] mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty," writes Whiting, forgetting that children need to find ways of processing the endless slew of new information that pours through them daily, and failing to realise that children are as often as not in love with beauty from the moment they are born, and are pretty good at seeking it out amongst the ruins of the adult world. That adult world can seem so strange and fantastical and full of difficult magic that the absolute best way to process it is in the fantastical world of words where moral dilemmas can be processed safely, at arm's length, without anyone getting hurt.
For my own part, I know for certain that without the books of Diana Wynne Jones I would have found the difficult parts of my childhood much harder to bear. I also know many, many children who still use fairy tales and a modicum of fear in the beautiful, wide-ranging literatures they read as a way of teaching themselves to become saner, stronger adults.
Put simply, children are not as stupid as Graeme Whiting thinks.
