Novels About Bad Schools

Categories: Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction

Spare me The Final Club. Spare me the plagiarized How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.  I'm too old to feel the pain of not having gotten into Princeton or Harvard, but right now I'm in the mood to read about students and teachers stuck for whatever reason in truly awful schools.  There's Jane Eyre, but I'm looking for ineptitude, not cruelty.

• One of my favorite books in the world is Bruce Jay Freedman's A Mother's Kisses, where the only school Joseph, a New York City native, gets into is an obscure Kansas agricultural college, where even apparently neutral courses like French, journalism, and chemistry involve much more in the way of farming lore than will be useful to his life's work.
• Evelyn Waugh's equally hilarious Decline and Fall  tells of Paul Pennyfeather's brief career as a schoolteacher at the pathetic Llanabba Castle school after he is (unfairly) expelled from Oxford for "indecent behavior."
• Richard Yates's A Good School isn't such a bad school; it's just in bad financial straits and, like Llanabba Castle School, is ready to close for good at the end of the year.
• Jane Smiley's Moo seems roughly based on Iowa State University, which is a very good school, but in the fictionalized version, the students seem to learn little and the administration is corrupt from top to bottom.