Literary Education: What Key Stakeholders Think

Abstract

In order to determine the structure of literary education, i. e. the school literature demands of the key stakeholders in education as well as the institutions and resources used to satisfy those demands, we analyze the term “ literary education”, describing the long-established approach to interpreting the underlying concept, and use findings of qualitative sociological studies, such as focus groups and in-depth interviews with teachers, librarians, parents, college and high-school students. For all the interpretation differences, what the stakeholders have in common is the extremely low perceived role of school literature courses and libraries, along with searching for ways to satisfy the existing demands in other forms of acquiring literary knowledge and gaining reader experience.