Education of the doomed is a theme of "Never Let Me Go." In two senses: educating people who aren't necessarily going to use a good grade-school education in the traditional way, by going on to college and a professional career; and the doomed-ness of any brand-new kind of school, how hard it is to keep it going and how it feels when it's eventually destroyed. I'm not sure if I'm reading into this because of my own experiences, or whether there is a nontraditional school in the author's background that helped him understand how it felt. I wonder what a charter student today would make of this book. It must be a somewhat similar experience to my own late-70s experimental school. The process of running the school is so much more apparent; the students are aware that they are taking part in a school built expressly for them; and the physical plant is in bad shape and the supplies are crappy.

My own nontraditional school, where half the student body was not college-bound, was closed after I went there two years, when I was in 6th grade. Our 7th and 8th grade teachers used to comment that the students who had attended this school were noticeably brighter than the other students. Then at 9th grade, we half that had college and career in our futures split off from the half that probably didn't. I realized a couple years ago that I assume all those other students are dead. My sister called me on this once; she sees people from school around town, and they're just regular people, not doomed geniuses.