From elementary to secondary school, teachers have come to recognize the advantages of the reader-response method in literary education. This type of literary criticism has encouraged discussions and analysis of the text, based on the student's thoughts and experiences, while dismissing the traditional training method where the teacher coaches and the students accept his interpretation without a second thought. This dynamic, productive educational practice has rejected the "right or wrong" teaching technique and has helped give voice to diverse young writers and journalists.
Reader-response puts the literary work's audience in a powerful place, letting the readers bring their own life experiences and emotions to the text. With a free mind and liberty to interpret a text the way a reader desires, the audience discovers that there can be a lot of possible meanings to a text, which makes literary criticism a continuous process and stops it from being just a static relationship between the text and its one absolute truth.
The basis of the reader-response literary criticism method lies in the interaction between readers and the exchange of their interpretations of the text. With the reader being active and more involved in what he reads, literature becomes the place to praise or criticize, but keeping always in mind that there can be different opinions that need to be taken into consideration. In this way, the readers learn to respect other people's backgrounds, they become familiar with diversity of opinions and often decide to adjust their own viewpoint accordingly.
Reader-response criticism accepts that there is not just one truth in a poem, story or novel. Different lives, ways of thinking, experiences, viewpoints and arguments come together to determine the many realities that make up a literary work of art. Through this critical approach in examining the text, the reader becomes more capable of judging and analyzing literature and better at evaluating other people's opinions and offering constructive feedback.