Rosen On Potter

Here's a blog entry, "What I Really Said About Harry Potter", by Michael Rosen, poet, children's novelist, and Children's Laureate in the U.K. He blogs about being misquoted by the media, and about education and literature. Some quotes:

"A story has been created which erroneously poses me in opposition to J.K. Rowling. Then, rather than anyone phoning me up to clarify (my phone number and email is freely available round the Press, as are the Laureateship press officer's), the Daily Mirror and some of the radio channels repeated the story. It's as if it was too juicy to be worth checking.

I take from this that anything that suggests that JKR or HP should be knocked off their perches is sexy. If it comes from someone with apparent knowledge or authority (sorry to puff myself up like that, but I only mean to acknowledge that the Laureateship has status rather than me personally), then the story becomes even sexier. What a shame. The world of children's books is full of extraordinary stories of people writing in adversity, of new and exciting experimental writing, of huge successes post-HP, of new publishers trying things out. It's also full of stories about how things could be improved or helped through television and radio, changes to the school curriculum and the library service.

There is also a big story that any of the broadsheets could have carried which is about literature itself. It goes something like this: British public culture acknowledges that literature is, or should be, an important part of life.

If this is the case, then there is a question to be asked about what part does education have to play in this literary culture? I would suggest that this kind of question has slipped off the agenda as far as primary schools are concerned. To put it crudely, many schools have been squeezed into being more concerned about literacy than literature."

via Zen In Darkness. Thanks for the link!