People love to talk about “the classics” as if they’re clean and bloodless, but really, they’re nasty. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are full of murder and suicide on the dramatic side, and he was the master of the filthy joke. That doesn’t stop people from deciding they’re better for kids than modern books, however, and one British schoolmaster in particular is upset anybody under 18 can read Game of Thrones.
Graeme Whiting, head of the Acorn School in Gloucester, took his blog recently to decry the fact that kids are no longer forced to read the classics, because nothing fosters a lifelong love of reading like being forced to sit through 17th-century poets with no context. He also has some, uh, curious beliefs about how fantasy novels work:
Buying sensational books is like feeding your child with spoons of added sugar, heaps of it, and when the child becomes addicted it will seek more and more, which if related to books, fills the bank vaults of those who write un-sensitive books for young children!
Whiting lists, among others, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and the works of Terry Pratchett as said “addictive” books that can be sold “without a special license.” And then he states he thinks they cause mental illness in kids.
The irony here is that a lot of these books are based on the classics. Lord of the Rings draws heavily from Nordic sagas; J.R.R. Tolkien, before he was known for hobbits, was a respected classics scholar. Most of the darkest, most violent moments in Game of Thrones are drawn directly from or riff on historical events from English, Scottish, and Irish history. Harry Potter is more or less a catalogue of mythology, ranging from old English folk tales to the entire Hogwarts staff having some sort of pun or joke about mythology hidden in their names.
This is not to say you should introduce elementary schoolers to the lighthearted shenanigans of Ramsay Bolton, of course. And it perhaps says something that the griping has slowly shifted from kids not reading books to kids reading the “wrong” books. Still, when literature is presented as nothing more than the answers to some trivia questions, there’s no reason to care about it. When it’s a living, breathing thing, constantly changing and inspiring new twists on old ideas, now that’s interesting. Although throwing in a few dirty jokes never hurts.
(Via The Telegraph)
