Charles Dickens, the Bible, and Us

The responsible teaching of literature and other humanistic studies from kindergarten through college may be said to require balancing two countervailing interests and tendencies -- the understandable, but sometimes authoritarian, "centripetal" desire to convey and reproduce what is taken to be good in the inherited cultural legacy, and the opposite, "centrifugal" desire to augment liberty and openness to new perspectives and possibilities.