Reading Groups

Bad Education: Contemporary Fiction and the Problem of School with Chris Holmes

3 Sessions Wednesdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT March 12 to May 14, 2025

The Center for Fiction

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
3/12, 4/16, 5/14
In Person at The Center for Fiction

Is education sometimes worthless, or worse, damaging, if not deadly? The three novels, one from the 20th Century and two from the 21st Century, answer this question in different ways.

In Donna Tartt’s archetypal campus novel, The Secret History, the singular pursuit of aesthetic knowledge and a perfected form of beauty eclipses morality. For the students of the Hailsham school in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, their studies and the drive for artistic skill are a grim veneer over the truth of their unusual fates. And, finally, Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers shocks with a near-future dystopia in which the state sentences mothers it deems unsatisfactory to a school meant to teach them the perfected maternal state: the complete abandonment of the self. We will approach each novel from many different vantage points—style, form, narration, literary history, and so forth—but with a special attention to how institutional education can both lift up and oppress

What to read in advance of the first meeting: The Secret History

What to expect from this reading group: This course will be conversation and participant driven, with history and literary context offered by the instructor.

Reading List:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Capacity: 20

Led by

Chris Holmes

Chris Holmes

Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the creator and host of the literary podcast Burned by Books. He is also the co-producer and host of Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society for Novel Studies. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature is published with Bloomsbury. Since 2011 he has been the co-organizer of the New Voices Literary Festival at Ithaca College.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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