ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ground of American education and its practices to fill in the context of the claim that education and literature are crucially interrelated and interdependent. It also discusses the various struggles education comes to inhabit and to the ways that literature represents and reproduces those struggles. The chapter utilizes Quest as a tool to look back on schooling, pressing economic concerns, and the logic of capitalist democracy. It argues that universal public schooling needed to embrace citizenship to justify its existence and, second, that to teach citizenship is to teach students how to function in capitalism. Historically, capitalist mechanisms are implicated in both education and the democracy it is supposed to emblematize. The American Baptist Free Mission Society had good reason to explicate the opposition between education and slavery, writing at a time when slavery was only five years removed and when black education was tremendously dangerous work for students and teachers alike.
