Find all our Student Opinion questions here.

It’s Banned Books Week in the United States, which, according to the American Library Association, is an annual event that celebrates “the freedom to read” and “spotlights current and historical attempts to censor books in libraries and schools.”

Have your parents, teachers or school administrators ever forbidden you from reading a book because they thought its content or characters were inappropriate for someone your age? If so, did you listen to them? Or did you read that book anyway?

In an essay in The New York Times, the author, Margaret Renkl, writes about why “banning books is about as useless as trying to ban air.”

NASHVILLE — When the Rev. Dan Reehil, a Catholic priest, ordered the removal of all Harry Potter books from the parish school’s library, the St. Edward community demanded an explanation. Father Reehil responded by email, noting that he had “consulted several exorcists, both in the United States and in Rome,” and had been assured that the “curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text.”

I read all seven Harry Potter books aloud to all three of my children, one at a time, as they became old enough to understand the books’ complicated plots, so I understand why Father Reehil’s explanation assuaged no parental concerns. Exorcists? Real spells? No wonder the story became international news almost as soon as The Tennessean broke it. Articles about the incident have appeared in outlets as diverse as The Washington Post, CBS News, Entertainment Weekly, The Independent in Britain, and Forbes, among many others.

Before I heard this story, I would not have thought it necessary to point out that Harry Potter is a fictional character and that these books are not spellbooks. They are novels, tales J.K. Rowling made up out of her prodigious imagination.

Harry Potter and his friends don’t exist in real life, but they wrestle with real-life challenges: bullies, rejection, loneliness, fear, grief — and, yes, with clueless adults whose behavior is patently ludicrous. Nashville’s St. Edward School might as well be Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, for the story of Father Rehill sounds very much like the story of Delores Umbridge, a Ministry of Magic bureaucrat-turned-school-inquisitor.

Ms. Rowling may well be a magician, but the magic she conjures is far more wonderful than even the spells in her books: She got kids to read again. And perhaps grown-ups, too — I often found myself reading deep into the night, long after the child beside me had fallen asleep, merely for the pleasure of Ms. Rowling’s translucent prose and extravagant world-building.

There was a time when the Harry Potter titles were routinely targets of a challenge, the American Library Association’s term for an attempt to remove books from a library or school curriculum. The first three volumes were among the most challenged books of the decade that began in 1990, even though they weren’t published in the United States until midway through 1999. By the following decade, the series was at the very top of the list.

According to “Don’t Tell the Grownups,” Alison Lurie’s groundbreaking 1990 exploration of the way classic children’s literature has always undercut convention, “Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with cleareyed directness, remarking — as in Andersen’s famous fairy tale — that the emperor has no clothes.”

Little surprise, then, that two decades of efforts to protect children from imaginary spells have made no difference at all. Harry Potter titles have sold more the 500 million copies worldwide.