In this article, the author examines Louise Rosenblatt's "Literature as Exploration," a popular textbook used since 1938 (in five successive editions) in high school English classrooms across America. He discusses how the one-time college roommate of Margaret Mead managed to transform teaching literature into a form of student therapy that…

One of the major problems from which students suffer has to do with reading: reading with diligence, understanding, and, ideally, with the pleasure that attends discovery. Many students have long been hermeneutical-readers-of-a-sort. The problem has deep roots in a widely diffused media and technocyber environment that thins down and disperses the…

Americans are reading less; comprehension is eroding. And where reading intersects with academic achievement and participation in civic matters and cultural activities, the results are dire. Thus concludes the new National Endowment for the Arts study, "To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence". A divergent group of experts…

A report from the National Endowment for the Arts, among much other such research, reveals that literacy is in serious decline in America. Ramifications of this decline extend beyond English and language departments to affect all other disciplines, ultimately raising the question of how a democracy can function when its citizens abandon the…