I had a request to repost this article under a different subject
heading so more people would be aware of the content of this message.
Thanks
Kristin and LM Group - Here is a newspaper editorial by Katherine
Kersten from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 29, 1997 that
might be of interest to you. This is a shortened version of the
article. At the time of this editorial, Katherine Kersten was chair
of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis and a
commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."
Here it is:
Tomorrow the Anoka-Hennepin School District will hold its second
hearing on whether horror writer R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" books
belong in an elementary school library. Though debate on this
question has raged for a month, it has so far generated more heat
than light. At least, that's how it seemed to me the other day, when
I picked up a couple of "Goosebumps" books from my local library.
Blaine parent Margaret Byron - who has asked her school to consider
whether horror fiction of this sort is appropriate for third-graders
- has been widely dismissed as a meddlesome, puritanical busybody.
Yet "Goosebumps" defenders have managed to seize the high ground only
because they've framed the debate in a way that obscures its real
substance.
Significantly, tragedy--the most frightening of literary
genres--is often viewed as the highest human art form. Its first
practitioners, the ancient Greeks, believed its power sprang from its
ability to include two emotions: fear and pity or synpatheia--the
ability to "feel with" others' suffering. The Greeks viewed
suffering as a path to knowledge, both of oneself and of the world.
Tragedy, they said, ennobles the human soul by allowing us to "enter
into" the sufferings of others, and learn vicariously from their
hard-won experience.
We see this principle at work in good literature ranging from
"Oedipus Rex" to "Treasure Island."
"Goosebumps" books differ from works like these in a critical
way --they induce fear, but drive out pity. When the tour guide in
"A Night in Terror Tower" prepares his guests to view the torturers'
"many ways" to "inflict pain," the main character crows, "I [can't]
wait to get inside."
Moreover, "Goosebumps" readers are in constant fear; the
books are raw catalogs of horrors whose pasteboard characters serve
merely to advance the plot from one shock to the next. Far from
encouraging empathy, "Goosebumps" lead children to objectify others,
and to enjoy--with morbid fascination--the spectacle of their
suffering.
"Goosebumps" defenders essentially employ three arguments. They
insist, first, on something that seems self-evident - kids love books
that scare them. "Goosebumps"
may frighten children, they say, but so do Grimms' beloved "Fairy
Tales," with their wicked witches and poisoned apples. Parents are
hard-pressed to argue with this. My
own children's favorite book is J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the
Rings," which bristles with brutish "orcs" and a man-eating spider.
Our children are caught up in the downward spiral of an
ever-more-debased popular culture. No harm done, we tell ourselves -
we're just letting them "choose for themselves." This consoling
thought lets us off the hook, making it easy to abdicate our
responsibility as parents and educators. I'm afraid, however, that it
is wishful thinking.
"Shock fiction" for grade-schoolers comes with a price, and our
children will pay it.
--
Beverly Nelson
Media Generalist
Spring Grove Public School
113 2nd Ave NW
Spring Grove, Minnesota 55974
507-498-3223
bev.nelson@springgrove.k12.mn.us
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