2. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987). This book will be cited as BL in the text for all subsequent references.

3. Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 180. See also Susan Laird, "The Ideal of the Educated Teacher: 'Reclaiming a Conversation' with Louisa May Alcott," Curriculum Inquiry 21, no. 3 (1991).

4. See for instance, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) or Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

5. Morrison says "the language has to be quiet, it has to engage your participation...It's not just telling the story; it's about involving the reader...My language has to have holes and spaces so the reader can come into it...Then we...come together to make this book, to feel this experience," in Claudia Tate, "Conversation with Toni Morrison," Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), 125. On Morrison's definition of "black" literature see Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and J.A. Appiah, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (New York: Amistad, 1993), 418.

6. Kal Alston , "Race Consciousness and the Philosophy of Education," Philosophy of Education 1995, ed. Alven Nieman (Urbana, Ill.: Philosophy of Education Society, 1996), 149-56. Mae Gwendoyn Henderson, "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman's Literary Tradition," in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Reading Black, Reading Feminist (New York: Meridian, 1990), 116-44.

7. See in particular Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1970); Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Signet, 1977); and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Plume, 1982). While this subtext is most explicit in these novels, it is present as well in Toni Morrison, Sula, Jazz, and Paradise. On Du Bois's idea of the "talented tenth" see W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth," in The Future of the Race, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West (New York: Vintage, 1996), 133-58.

8. Susan Huddleston Edgerton, "Toni Morrison Teaching the Interminable," in Race, Identity, and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (New York: Routledge, 1993), 220-35; John Howard Hedman, "Images of Higher Education in the Novels of the 1980s," Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993; and Joan F. Peterson, "The Portrayal of the Schoolteacher in American Literature based upon Colonial Types, 1794-1987," Ph.D. diss., University of San Francisco, 1994.

9. Cynthia Dubin Edelberg, "Morrison's Voices: Formal Education, the Work Ethic, and the Bible," American Literature 58 (1986): 217-37 and Susan Searls, "Race, Schooling, and Double-Consciousness: The Politics of Pedagogy in Toni Morrison's Fiction," The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (1996): 193-94.

10. Morrison quoted in Elsie B. Washington, "A Conversation with Toni Morrison," Essence 18 (October 1987): 58.

11. Quoted in Jan Furman, Toni Morrison's Fiction (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 70.

12. See, for instance, B.F. Skinner, The Technology of Teaching (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968). Though Skinner did not advocate the sort of violence Schoolteacher deploys, Morrison's character dramatizes the potential for violence in a conception of teaching as a technology.

13. Plato, "Meno," in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 7 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).

14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

15. See James E. Wood, "Religion and Education in American Church-State Relations," in Religion, the State, and Education, ed. James E. Wood, Jr. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 1984).

16. Jane Roland Martin, Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and Curriculum (New York: Routledge, 1994), 7-8, 113-15.

17. See Catharine Beecher, "Essay on the Education of Female Teachers," in Classics in the Education of Girls and Women, ed. Shirley Nelson Kersey (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1981) and Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

18. Roger Sale, "Toni Morrison's Beloved," in Toni Morrison: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990).

19. My use of this term is based on that of Jim Garrison, Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).

20. Cornel West, Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race, Class and Power in America, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism, Vol. II (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1993), 242.