Laura Mallory is a concerned mother of three. She wants the Harry Potter books removed from the library of J.C. Magill Elementary School in the Gwinnett County, Georgia, public school system where her children attend because she says the books, which have world-wide sales of more than 300 million, glorify witchcraft. Mallory first took her complaint to the county school board in September 2005. In May of 2006, the board decided that the books should remain in the library. Malloy then took her concerns to the state board where a decision will be made sometime in December. Here is an indication of her naïveté, believing that if Harry Potter is banished all will be right in the public schools and that the schools and all the teachers have the best worldview interests of her children at heart: “When my children are at school, I’m trusting them to the teachers and that school. They are my most precious things in the entire world to me. I surely don’t want them indoctrinated into a religion whose practices are evil.”[1]
She has embarked on a fool’s errand. I’m always amazed when I read stories about well intentioned parents who want this book removed or that course dropped as if these minor changes will result in an educational reformation. It’s not going to happen. The sooner parents learn this, the sooner they will save their children from things worse than witchcraft—like the belief that public education is a neutral endeavor designed to equip young people to be objective learners. Based on what the courts have decided over the years, the public schools are “religious (Christian)-free zones.” In a word, they are officially atheistic. You would think that most Christian parents would be concerned about this. They’re not. They continue to believe that public education can be saved. It can’t. Mrs. Mallory is spitting in the wind when she doesn’t have to. Her children are being co-opted everyday by a more subtle type of witchcraft, the “philosopher’s stone” of the magic-laden and irrational worldview of materialism. Her children are being taught that they’ve descended from animals, that they are animals. “When it comes to DNA,” the people at Time magazine tell us, “a human is closer to a chimp than a mouse is to a rat.”[2] This is first-rate paganism. Gone is the belief that we are endowed by our “Creator with certain inalienable rights.” This concerned mother is more concerned with what sits on the library shelves than what is actually being taught in the classroom.
Public schools have become the new worldview battleground. Christians are fighting on the enemy’s soil when they should be building their own educational kingdom. Harry Potter is a symptom of a larger crisis that is easily fixed if parents take the responsibility of educating their own children and refuse to turn them over to the State for secular propagandizing.
Endnotes:
[1] Laura Diamond, “Mom: Ban Potter (Hogwarts and all),” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (October 4, 2006), D8. [2] Michael D. Lemonick and Andrea Dorfman, “What Makes Us Different?,” Time (October 9, 2006), 46.