Autumn, John Keats tells us, is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Well, maybe. But it’s also the season when millions of Americans go back to the strange institution called “school.” Whether at the elementary, middle school, high school, college, or graduate level, it’s a massively important entity, serving a remarkably diverse set of functions: training us in the ABCs of comportment as well as reading; delaying, sometimes to the point of absurdity, the entry of people onto the job market, with effects sometimes benign, sometimes disastrous; creating a venue for whatever culture our weird society, so covetous of prestige and so conflicted about elitism, is able to muster. The multifariousness of this institution is remarkable: the experience of a student in Flint, Michigan, (to pick one example from our selections in this issue) is radically different from that of a student in the Connecticut suburbs; that of college students utterly different from high schoolers; that of people on the other side of the institution, looking to “go back,” or maybe just looking back, completely different from those enmeshed in it, and so on.

Yet for all this diversity, the writing about schools and schooling has been, to my eye, amazingly drab, full of the stereotypes—horny professors, bored high schoolers—that afflict our thinking about school and schooling. Mr. chips and Lucky Jim, Holden Caulfield and his spiritual descendants, the bored college kids engaged in mindless acts of sexual coupling in Bret Easton Ellis’s or Tom Wolfe’s novels (who thought they would prove to be brothers under the skin?): these are by and large the characters who over-populate these fictions. And of course the MFA program, that rapidly growing supplement to the century-long development of “creative writing” into a separate discipline, has spawned countless fictions by MFA graduates (doubtless bearing in mind the injunction to “write what you know”) about MFA programs, their rivalries, intensities, and aftermath. There are of course some exceptions—Susan Choi’s recent novel, An Education, does a wonderful job of portraying graduate school at a particular historical moment, now probably past, where politics, sex, and an appreciation of the traditional canon were brought together in a heady and exciting brew.

But for those of us who are enmeshed in the pedagogic/scholarly complex we call “school,” these imaginative responses fall short. Our experience—of the classroom, in the classroom, as scholars, as teachers, as graduates—is far more complicated than these responses indicate. To try to address this complexity, I started looking for submissions and soliciting some that would take “school” in its broadest sense as their subject. I’ve culled from many excellent responses the ones that follow in this cluster: poetry, nonfiction, and fictional prose alike, they address many (if not yet enough) of the kinds of experience that are elicited by the institutions of schooling in the contemporary US. Ranging from Rebecca Makkai’s astringent account of fourth-grade teaching through Eileen Pollack’s narrative that turns on the question of lifelong learning, ranging from Stephen Burt’s poetic evocations of youth and education through Douglas Trevor’s exhilarating narrative of a life-remaking piece of scholarship, from Cindy Clem’s real-life response to teaching an introductory English class to Kelsey Ronan’s fictional narrative of all too real conditions in an urban school district, these works, taken together, portray the ups and the downs, the imaginative achievements and the spiritual trials, the oppressions and the consolations of school. As many of us prepare to write new narratives in the year to come, I hope these will resonate as a partial marker of the multiplicity and richness of the experiences possible in, as well as the failures and limitations built into the model of, schooling in these United States.