The humanist position for the teaching of values can be turned against English teachers and literature education when it is based primarily on the assumption that literature directly portrays life, a strategy which was used by a religious fundamentalist group, Renaissance Peterborough, in its dispute with officials of Peterborough County, Ontario, during a censorship controversy. The fundamentalists argued at a more sophisticated level than that of interpretative literalism, stressing the sociological implications of reading in context, as well as the aesthetic and literary. The teachers maintained, on the one hand, that critical detachment from the text ensures that students will not be co-opted by its moral "dicta," and on the other, that the educational value of literature lies in its capacity to alter their lives for the better. The literary text by virtue of its literariness is open to manifold interpretations. Currently, literature itself, both as an art and as a discipline, is under siege, not only from censors but also from sociology, poststructuralist criticism, linguistics, information theory, and back-to-basics heresies about the redundancy of the literary in conceptions of literacy. Educators are thus forced to re-examine the relationship between word and idea, image and action, and literature and life. (NKA)