A college educator (trained in composition) encountered some problems when he began teaching an introductory literature course. In the first year of the course, he used a fiction anthology as his textbook. The class examined one story at a time, and attempts to compare readings seemed forced. The teacher realized that anthologies are narrow in…

In 1984, parents of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, ninth grader came before the school district's "Students' Right to Learn Committee" to object to what they described as a bowdlerized version of "Romeo and Juliet" in the Scott, Foresman text, and the publisher's failure to acknowledge in the text that the play was abridged. The…

The three papers collected in this document present opinions for and against the use of anthologies in introductory writing and literature classes at community colleges. The first paper, "College Students Must Read Book-Length Works," by Dallas E. Dillon, proposes that students, even non-traditional community college students, should be pushed to…

American educational institutions have used the literature of a few Anglo men to represent American literature. The problem of this one-sided presentation was alleviated somewhat during the 1960s when publishers began to offer some works of ethnic writers, especially for elementary school children. This was the result of influence by the civil…