Our Mission
The Center for Literary Education (CenterForLit) exists to equip parents and teachers with a powerful and accessible method for reading and teaching literature to their students. The goal of that method is to train readers to engage stories from an attitude best described by James 1:19: “let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” We believe such readers practice embodied listening, humility, and compassion, which form them into forces of healing for their communities and culture.
“The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality… in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism