In many ways, the progressive era of education in the United States never ended. While the idea of child-centered schooling never took hold on a large basis in America, education in the 21st century has been centered around children and their needs. As schools become more of an agent of socialization for their students, they, especially teachers, have grown more knowledgeable about the lives of those students (Webb and Metha, 2017). Efforts to learn about students are not made in a vacuum; when given the flexibility to adapt curriculum and teaching methods to students’ needs, good teachers will do so. One way teachers of English-language arts can do this is to use readings that mirror the lives of their students. In multicultural classrooms, the literature students read should mirror the cultures they belong to. It should be child-centered, a critical component of the progressivism promoted by John Dewey in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.