An ethnographic, sociological analysis of the purpose and practice of education in America. We use three case studies—a liberal arts college, a boarding school, and a Job Corps center—to illustrate how class, bureaucratic, and secular-religious dimensions of education prepare youth for participation in American foreign and domestic policy at all levels. Exploring how youth and their educators encounter the complexities of ideology and bureaucracy in school, this book explores the flawed redemptive relationship between education and society in the United States. Paradoxically, these three schools studied prepare students to participate in a society whose values they oppose.