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June 23, 2008, 09:20 AM ET
J. K. Rowling at Harvard 1
J. K. Rowling gave the commencement address at Harvard this month, and given the list of popular books on campus compiled regularly by The Chronicle, one can’t imagine a more appreciated speaker. A few students complained that she lacked the gravitas Harvard requires, but overall the audience loved her. And Rowling acknowledged how honored and intimidated she was by the setting and occasion.
The speech outlined the events that gave us Harry Potter — college, human rights work, marriage and divorce, motherhood, authorship — and the story contains an opposition relevant to the moment. Rowling contrasts two demands, those of getting a job and making a buck, and those of the creative imagination. She comes down, of course, on the side of the latter. She tells the Harvard overachievers:
“Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two.”
It’s a good message for the careerists in the crowd to hear. As she goes on, she also pushes a case for learning, and this is the value of her speech for educators. Rowling cites two ancient authors as sources of moral instruction and inspiration, Plutarch and Seneca, and her recourse should be broadcast to young lovers of Harry Potter everywhere. Nobody has done more to promote youth reading than Rowling (Oprah comes in second). For all the enthusiasm for Harry Potter, though, teen reading is still on the decline. Take Harry Potter out of the mix and unit sales of juvenile books go down every year. (Note: The screen reading that teens normally do is inferior to book reading.)
So, when 10th-graders come to class not wanting to read Shakespeare and Greek myth and Poe, even though they love the Sorcerer’s Stone, tell them what their author-hero says. If Rowling hadn’t read deeply in the classics, Harry Potter might never have happened.
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