For Morgan Day Frank, the teaching of literature made possible “[t]he expansion and elaboration of the [US] educational system . . . over the last two centuries” (vi). At a moment when both the teaching of literature in particular and the higher-educational sector in general are under attack, declining in popularity, and increasingly precarious, it is worth spending some time pondering, as Frank does, how this state of affairs was not inevitable, but was profoundly historically contingent, even “something of a miracle” (xv).
Frank's main argument, in Schools of Fiction: Literature and the Making of the American Educational System, is that “literature as an object of academic study—not psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, or mathematics—ensured the reproduction of the modern educational system after the Civil War. Literature proved indispensable to the project of modern education because it helped the school system identify itself with real social experience” (2). It's a...
