I grew up with a friend I could always count on. Every night at eight o’clock my father and my older brother came into my room to help deliver my friend to me. My mother and sister would come too sometimes, and together we would all visit with Harry. Harry and I grew up side-by-side. I got older as he did, and every challenge I faced I could be sure Harry was facing one far worse. I even made friends with Ron and Hermione, so much so that when it was all over I sobbed to think of the adventures we would no longer have.

Yes, my best friends in life have been fictional, but without Harry Potter in my life I don’t know who I’d be. I grew up with two wishes: to be a wizard, and to be Wendy from Peter Pan. I was upset when neither came true, but I’ve gone on to be a creative person, with ideas and thoughts that are controversial, but unique to me, and mostly because of the books read to me as a child, and eventually read by me as a young adult.

So, imagine my dismay when a teacher of mine told me to put away my favorite book in the world because she thought it was witchcraft! I was furious. She said we weren’t allowed to have that book in class, and instead I was encouraged to pick up a Nancy Drew Mystery.

No one can tell me what to read, just like no one can tell me how to think. Should a book be banned? That question, I will answer with another question- should a person be aloud to think for themselves? If you answered yes to the second you are answering no to the first. To me literature, witchcraft or not, molds and creates some of the world’s greatest thinkers. The thought that a person could be deprived of not only a book, but also a lifetime friend is something to be mourned. The loss of books in our school is a tragic loss, but not altogether uncommon.

Last year there was a petition to ban Harry Potter from sixteen states. In fact when looking up “books most banned” on Google almost half of the books on a reading list I received from a University were on the ‘banned’ list. I’m talking about classic literature, and innocent books like James in the Giant Peach and The Little House on the Prairie. The Hatchet was banned because the descriptions of physical pain were ‘too descriptive.’ Bridge to Terabithia apparently contains a little too much grief. Shel Silverstien’s The Giving Tree was supposedly sexist!

Now by all means go on banning books, if you want to live in a backwards-moving society that is. There really is no argument. You can forbid your child from a book, but don’t try and forbid the world from it, in the end it will only come back to haunt you, because with out Harry Potter, who knows who I would be?