Hmm, interesting question. I’ll take a stab at it.

My argument would be that the human mind is a complicated thing, too complicated to be analogized to a brownie recipe where a given set of ingredients produces a particular mouth-watering treat. The brain is billions of connections, an image, a scent, a sound, a snatch of misunderstood speech, a flood of adrenalin, a hormone or two, ideas, emotions, mistaken conclusions, time, space, randomness. More elements, more ingredients than we can hope to discretely label, interacting in ways we don’t understand, producing results that we cannot possibly reverse engineer.

I remember during my very brief college experience being rather baked (speaking of brownies) and stepping into the dorm elevator to find that about a dozen large deli dill pickles were on the floor of that elevator. No broken jar, just pickles. I have a poor visual memory but for some reason that image stuck with me. I have no idea what little cascade that set off in my brain but the fact that it remains so clear to me suggests it had some kind of impact. For good? For ill? For just weird? Without that pickle tableau might I have become a venture capitalist or a monk? Damned if I know.

We don’t know that adding Dickens or Tolstoy necessarily creates a thoughtful mind, any more than we can be sure that adding Stephanie Meyer will cause an outbreak of chronic lip-biting. (Probably, but we don’t know for sure.) Let the brain have experience. There are mysterious things going on down in the brain, things we cannot predict or control. Let the brain have data. Let the brain rattle through life like a little pinball running into things and become whatever it becomes. You can’t program the elevator pickles, they just happen.

Let people (even kids) read whatever the hell they want to read. It won’t kill them, it may do something amazing, we don’t know, we should stop pretending we do and let the little brains run wild and free.