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. For many centuries, the former practice prevailed — as it still does in much of the “undeveloped” world today — with emphasis on tribal and religious memory. Islamic education is a good example: At its worst it is simply indoctrination and conformity. Today in the modern West and its global counterparts, the latter tendency prevails, with a strong emphasis on novelty, self-expression, utility, and the rejection of any traditional authority. Balancing these two needs and desires often seems more theoretically than actually possible, and in fact the great crisis in the teaching of the so-called humanities in college is the enormous and rapid recent decline in enrollments in literature and history courses.
