In the 1930s as fascism rose to power in Europe and gained in popularity at home, literary and educational theorist Louise Rosenblatt argued that “the study of literature can have a very real, and even central, relation to points of growth in the social and cultural life of a democracy.” In her view, the classroom should be a laboratory for democracy where students could encounter, inhabit, and try out other points of view. Through the process of testing their ideas in the classroom community, students could further develop empathy and imagination, capacities that Rosenblatt saw as essential traits for citizens to possess and critical to the functioning of a democratic society.
Rosenblatt was also reacting to two prevailing approaches in English classrooms that she hoped to counter. First, she opposed instruction that reduced literature to “didactic or moralistic” messages. Memorizing and reciting poems like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” or reading stories such as Edward Everett Hale’s "The Man Without a Country," reflected the “craving for some easy, reassuring formula,” she thought. Being spoon-fed patriotism, Rosenblatt believed, made youth vulnerable to anti-democratic ideologies that promised something easier and better. The educational theorist, like her contemporary, the Progressive philosopher John Dewey, wanted students to learn to think for themselves, and to grapple with the moral and civic ambiguities that literature presented.
Rosenblatt was pushing back not only against rote learning and the oversimplification of literature in America’s schools, but also against the New Criticism, an approach that was beginning to dominate instruction at the college level. In particular, the New Critics emphasized consensus and continuity over debate, a theory that—unlike Rosenblatt’s approach to reading—ignored the reader.
Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration, published in 1938 for the Progressive Education Association’s Commission on Human Relations, argued for a method of teaching literature that valued equally books and their readers. The book went through five editions, and Rosenblatt’s ideas shaped generations of teachers. She offered them a way to encourage their students to foster the kinds of relationships with literature that had led many teachers to enter the profession.
Her theories eventually found their heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, when reading lists finally started to diversify and more students could see their own life experience represented in the literature they were assigned.