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This study examined the influence of education, expertise, and gender on child, college student, and postgraduate level readers' moral understanding of the themes and characters of the Harry Potter books. The researchers recruited 49 fourth to sixth graders, 19 seventh to twelfth graders, 34 college students and 21 masters/PhD-level participants to complete a measure rooted in Rest's 4 component model of morality. All readers identified courage and friendship as major themes. Older, more educated readers took a more complex view of the characters' moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral character, especially for the morally ambiguous character Snape. Harry Potter experts, who we defined as children who had read all the books multiple times, often had more complex understanding of characters than did other child readers. The findings, which support the value of the series for character education, are congruent with Narvaez's contention that the understanding of moral texts is mediated by moral schemas and expert/novice differences.
HARRY POTTER: ARE CHILDREN AND ADULTS READING THE SAME BOOKS?
Controversy over the moral content of the J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy series has been characterized by an increasingly polarized debate. In general, educators have argued that the books send children moral messages about courage and friendship (e.g. Anatol, 2003; Bridger, 2002) while parents who come from a perspective that holds the Christian Bible as revealed truth have challenged the books on the grounds of their immoral messages about breaking rules and promoting sorcery (e.g., Albanes, 2001; E-mail chain letter, 2001; Kjos, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c). Given the widespread practice of using moral stories for moral and character education (e.g. Bennett, 1993; Gurian, 2000; Kilpatrick, 1993; Lickona, 1991; Tappan & Brown, 1989), it seemed important to empirically examine children's actual moral understanding of this internationally popular series. Our pilot studies of children's moral understanding of the books (Whitney, Vozzola, & Hofmann, 2001) suggested that children were not reading Harry Potter through the same moral spectacles as adults. Narvaez (2001) has found that background knowledge, reading skill, moral schemas and expert/novice differences often filter the moral messages children take away from texts. Using Narvaez and colleagues' methods for examining moral texts (e.g., Narvaez, 1998; Narvaez & Gjellstad Endicott, 1999), we have spent the past 4 years exploring...