It is not a simple matter to reply to the student who says, ‘Look, I can see all your reasons for saying that Shakespeare is better than James Bond but I like reading James Bond more than Shakespeare.’ The student may defend his preference by saying that James Bond is easier to read, identification with the hero is much simpler, it's more exciting, and so on. Many teachers find themselves in the rather embarrassing position of secretly sharing the student's preference for ‘a good read’ but feel obliged to press a case for Shakespeare which they may not strongly feel at all. This often produces in literature teachers a kind of guilt or a feeling of hypocrisy. After a hard day at school the teacher may well be disinclined to read Shakespeare – all he may want to do is ‘escape’ into James Bond or television.

There is, of course, nothing hypocritical about this. When we want to relax, or ‘turn off’, our most easily satisfied tastes and preferences are often quite naturally the dominant ones: the danger remains, however, that the teacher may develop a kind of cynicism about introducing students to great literature when he feels that much of the time he himself prefers the second- or thirdrate.