Literary Analysis in Avonlea

They had studied Tennyson's poem in school the preceding winter, the Superintendent of Education having prescribed it in the English course for the Prince Edward Island schools. They had analyzed and parsed it and torn it to pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them, and Anne was devoured by secret regret that she had not been born in Camelot. Those days, she said, were so much more romantic than the present. (from Ann of Green Gables)

Socratic Education

"the education of the intellect, by awakening the principle and method of self-development, was his proposed object; not any specific information that can be conveyed into it from without; not to assist in storing the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting-room; but to place it in such relations of circumstances as should gradually excite that germinal power that craves no knowledge but what it can take up into itself—what it can appropriate and reproduce in fruit of its own. To shape—to dye—to paint over and to mechanize the mind, he resigned, as their proper trade, to the sophists; against whom he urged open and unremitting war.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge