A Defense of Potter, or When Religion is Not Religion: An Analysis of the Censoring of the Harry Potter Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Resume: L'article propose une analyse de la recente controverse suscitee a Toronto par les romans de J.K. Rowling. Cedant aux accusations de parents selon lesquelles la serie Harry Potter faisait la promotion de la sorcellerie, la commission scolaire du comte de Durham a retire des salles de classe les ouvrages incrimines. Julia Saric replace les faits dans une perspective plus generale, celle de la censure des recits merveilleux et fantastiques pour la jeunesse. Les œuvres en cause ne contiennent pas de references a la secte dite de Wicca mais elles appartiennent a un genre qui, selon Northrop Frye, ne doit pas etre juge en fonction des criteres moraux imposes aux recits realistes. Enfin, l'analyse fait valoir qu'il faut faire confiance a l'imagination des jeunes lecteurs, car les Harry Potter ne sont pas des romans initiant a la «vraie vie». Ils peuvent, toutefois, se reveler des outils pedagogiques susceptibles d'eveiller la sensibilite litteraire des jeunes. Summary: This paper is an analysis of the recent controversy surrounding objections to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The author examines in detail how Toronto's Durham County School Board responded to parental complaints regarding alleged occult themes in the books by temporarily restricting classroom reading of the materials. The issues that arose in this particular case are then examined for their larger significance within censorship debates concerning children's books and the genre of fantasy in particular. Arguing that Rowling's books do not in fact contain references to the actual religion Wicca, the author then moves on to discuss how various authors and theorists have defended fantasy as a genre that must be seen as what Frye would call stubborn structure — a fictional creation that resists being interpreted according to real-world morals and standards. Finally, the author argues that imaginative engagement with a text provides the best opportunity for students to contemplate literature as a total form whose value lies in its ability to simultaneously engage readers and draw attention to the artfulness of its construction. The author concludes by stating that the Harry Potter books should not be judged as any kind of guide to life, and that parents and educators would do well to utilize, within the context of literacy education, the readers' genuine interest in and enjoyment of the books.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".