UK Principal Claims Harry Potter And Other Popular Fantasy Books Can Cause Brain Damage

For years now, educators around the world have generally extolled the virtues of popular young adult book series like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games for engaging young readers in a way that assigned scholastic reading hasn’t managed to do.

Now, an educator in the United Kingdom wants to put a stop to all that; in a blog post, Graeme Whiting, the headmaster of the Acorn School in the English town of Nailsworth, claimed that fantasy books “can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children.”

Whiting, in language that evokes the tone of Dr. Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent attacks on comic books in the ’50s, claimed that such work can contribute to making children “difficult” and urged parents to “Beware the devil in the text! Choose beauty for your young children!”