Hogwarts Professor

I’m being interviewed on Saturday, 16 November, by Nick Peters at ‘Deeper Waters.’ If you’ve ever wanted to ask me a question in person and not yet been able to get to a convention or conference where I’ve spoken, here’s your chance for, if not face-to-face contact, then at least ‘real time’ back and forth!

How do you contact ‘Deeper Waters’ to ask your question? Nick writes:

The show will air from 3-5 PM EST on 11/16/2013. The call-in number if you have a question is 714-242-5180. The link can be found here.

I look forward to hearing from you!

The serious reader who sent me this ‘Child Proofing Harry Potter’ piece that appeared on the Times’ Adventures in Parenting page noted that it may have been written by an internet troll longing to excite literature-mavens-who-blog into a lather of condemnation of what she calls “pink washing” texts. “Pink washing” is the stripping of everything challenging, politically incorrect, or of any depth by changing words as reading aloud or by explanation of what is “really meant.”

The historical terms for this are not “pink washing,’ which is admirable at least in simultaneously being offered as label by the practitioner and being at least as revealing and pejorative as any moniker a critic could have dreamed up, but Bowdlerization and expurgation. Think Adventures of Huckleberry Finn without the word “nigger.”

Yes, I find this sort of thing unfortunate and reprehensible. No, while I see the reader’s point about the troll baiting, I confess I am not tempted to ‘go there’ in terms of righteous condemnation.

Instead of anger at mom what I feel is pity for the child whose imagination is so tightly circumscribed by a mother who is so entrenched in her age appropriate categories and righteous mother protectiveness. And Mother Messina probably deserves my sympathy, too, because of her mental posture and invincible confidence in her parenting control and omniscience vis a vis what is best for child is only evidence of her being thoroughly, even inescapably enmeshed by school-mind.

Mom, in other words, shows all the smug assurance of an ideological Marxist or Christian fundamentalist, albeit here in the professional educator’s mechanical surety of what right things are allowed in a child-student’s head and the exact sequence with which they are allowed entrance. She is forever immunized against the reality of how human beings actually learn and mature because of the Newtonian educational universe in which she imagines herself. Which universe, sadly, because we are all children of our own schooling like it or not, we all inhabit to greater or lesser degrees.

Your comments and corrections, please. A tip of the eHat to John and Eric!