Censoring your kids' reading (was Self-Evaluation)

[psychic_serpent]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, Binx <binx04 at y...> wrote:
 > As children, my mother strongly discouraged my
> brothers, sister and me from reading any
> science-fiction or fantasy novels. Classics like
> Little Women or The Secret Garden were acceptable
> reading choices, as were verified school assignments
> (no sneaking in a borrowed copy of The Lion, The Witch
> and The Wardrobe and innocently trying to pass it off
> as our required reading for the term). I suppose her
> reasoning for this rule had to do with her opinion
> that if one couldn't discuss one's reading in polite
> conversation – say at a dinner party – then it had no
> business entertaining one's thoughts at all.

And just why couldn't science fiction (SF) or fantasy be discussed 
in 'polite conversation?'  My father-in-law is an SF writer, and my 
husband grew up in a milieu of people who regularly invaded his 
house (all right, they were actually invited on the first Friday of 
every month <g>) to spend long hours discussing how technology is 
going to change our lives in the future, or how a world in which the 
South had won the civil war, with the help of England, would be 
vastly different from the one we know.  

>From a very early age, my husband was exposed to very stimulating 
debates about science, history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, 
music art and literature through these discussions of the works his 
father and his colleagues were reading and writing (although I 
found, when I joined this family, that the discussions really ranged 
all over the place and were rarely confined to discussing SF and 
fantasy).  Some of my father-in-law's works in particular seem 
especially prescient now; the out-of-print "Barons of Behavior" 
addresses the issue of people being controlled by the government 
through various drugs, designed to achieve an optimum social 
structure.  (This work is actually cited in a paper from the FDA.)  
Some of the most incisive social commentary of the last century has 
been in the pages of science fiction and fantasy novels, such as by 
Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 
and William Gibson.

As we know from the social commentary JKR skillfully and 
unobtrusively includes in her work, it is possible to address a vast 
number of issues in the context of science fiction and fantasy 
without the debate becoming mind-numbingly pedagogical, as I've seen 
in some mainstream fiction.  And would your mother have forbidden 
you to read a classic like Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," often 
called the first work of science fiction?  Shelley explores some 
fascinating themes of the role of the creator, usurping the 
prerogatives of the gods, and inner demons that humans must battle 
throughout their lives. Some books also start off not seeming like 
fantasy, like Toni Morrison's award-winning "Beloved," or Colleen 
McCullough's "The Ladies of Missalonghi," but after a while you find 
out otherwise.  What about something like Milton's "Paradise Lost" 
or Homer's "Iliad?"  I would frankly call anything that had a basis 
in mythology or folklore to be fantasy, and that includes a great 
many 'classics.'

> Nevertheless, my mother encouraged us all in our
> creativity. I believe she simply wanted us children to
> have a sufficient grasp of reality before delving into
> the realm of fantasy. There were also rumors making
> the rounds concerning several certain known
> troublemakers in the neighborhood said to be involved
> in some "suspicious" Dungeons & Dragons role-playing
> which our parents were adamantly set against our
> participation and that may have had something to do
> with it as well.

We have reality all around us all the time.  Reading a mix of books 
will expose a maturing mind to a world of possibilities.  Humans 
have always entertained each other with tales of the fanastic.  In 
pre-literate times, traveling bards embellished their stories more 
and more with each telling.  Stories about 'real' people didn't 
really come along until the Decameron, during the Renaissance.  It 
was considered a great scandal for a work of literature to be 
about 'ordinary' people, rather than gods and goddesses and heroes, 
kings and queens and other larger-than-life figures.  When Mark 
Twain put Southern vernacular down on paper--especially black 
Southern vernacular coming out of a white character's mouth--it was 
a very big deal.  Honest representations of how people spoke and 
behaved were the exception in world literature for a very long time, 
not the rule.

I knew a small group of students in college who were admittedly a 
bit strange about their D & D addition.  It was virtually impossible 
to hold a conversation with any of these four people that did not 
delve into the realm of how powerful a mage they were or whether 
they had the proper weapon or number of points to survive a certain 
encounter with one of the other characters.  I found this tedious, 
frankly, and everyone else I knew who knew them found them to be 
exeedingly strange.  They occasionally actually attended lectures, 
but they largely seemed to have enrolled in a university to engage 
in this activity full time.  They didn't actually seem to be getting 
anything OUT of it, except for escape from their lives.  I could 
have long, interesting conversations with the SF and fantasy writers 
at my then-boyfriend's parents' house; I couldn't exchange more than 
a few words at a time with the D & D addicts.  ("Wanna go to the 
food trucks?" was about it.)  There is a vast difference between 
being a reader of SF and fantasy and being a D & D addict, even 
though there is admittedly some overlap in the groups.
 
> In any case, because I never read any fantasy books as
> a child, I consequently had no desire to begin as I
> matured. Yet still, I could not help but feel like I
> was missing out on something.

I'm feeling so sad now!  Reading fantasy books while I was growing 
up gave me so many hours of pleasure, and my kids are enjoying this 
now, too.  It's never too late to discover this world, but it's too 
bad it was kept from you when you were a kid.  I hate to think of my 
daughter never having read "The Diamond in the Window," "The Witch 
Family," or "Matilda."  My son has been enthralled by "Charlie and 
the Chocolate Factory," and the sequel, as well as all of 
the "Indian in the Cupboard," books, among many others.  They both 
love HP too, of course.  Kids will grow up and have to live in the 
real world soon enough, with job worries, paying the rent and so 
on.  Let them indulge in reading about fantastic worlds when they're 
kids; the "real" world will make off with them soon enough.

--Barb

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