Children’s Moral Reading of Harry Potter

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/PhDlevel 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