Are we betrayed by our schooling? However correct the classroom curricula, the social lessons of high school are massively misleading. Clubs, class pride, prom: The dream of a collective destiny is the most haunting legacy of schooling. Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (Alfred A. Knopf, 287 pages, $25) envisions that destiny as doom.

Mr. Ishiguro is a master of fantasies that entrap and devour his protagonists, and then his readers. Kathy H., the book’s narrator, recalls her time at the eccentric Hailsham School from a perspective of more than a dozen years. “There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting.”

Like many of Mr. Ishiguro’s narratives, “Never Let Me Go” begins by describing a world of privileged discipline. Stevens, the butler hero of “The Remains of the Day,” at first made his circumscribed modus vivendi seem enviable. His concept of dignity, which kept his personality confined to the outline of a neutral butler, seemed a marvel, a chivalric performance that mocked the employer class.

In the end Stevens, a fascinatingly unreliable narrator, implies his life has been a waste. Kathy’s voice does not have the ironic potential of Stevens’, nor does her story possess the intrinsic interest of his. But the structure of the two tales are quite similar, and in both Mr. Ishiguro creates the double-exposure of a life of integrity and a life-long mistake.

The Hailsham idyll is spoiled by our knowledge, from the start, that Kathy is now something called a “carer” who works with “donors,” some from Hailsham and some from places less appealing. She occasionally mentions stiffening details: “We didn’t do things like hug each other at Hailsham.”

The school, with its green lawns, pavilions, and forbidden rhubarb patches is quickly shown to be a kind of extended nursery, in which children are raised until their body parts are harvested for use by “normals.” Contrived and byzantine as Mr. Ishiguro’s vision of what amounts to clone harvesting may be, it is a resonant Bildungsroman.

The children were “told and not told,” Kathy recalls. “We were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.” Hailsham students are deceived by their superiors but also by themselves, and in this regard they stand as an allegory for all students.

Kathy recalls sexual awakening on the Hailsham campus. “There was this discreet agreement among us all not to quiz each other too much about our claims.” Here, Hailsham reality is no more warped than that at any high school. “It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.”

After graduation, Kathy and her friend go to the Cottages, where they learn to live independently while working on thesis essays. By design, they are meant to lose interest in these essays, and by extension in their identity as students – another canny riff on the real-life experience of a senior year. Kathy’s best friend, Ruth, is eager to abandon childhood, and she takes up with older students who did not attend Hailsham.

Ruth discovers that the benefits of Hailsham’s prestige end precisely where her new friend’s myths about Hailsham begin. Meanwhile, the true pleasure in Kathy and Ruth’s school days becomes a liability, a kind of nostalgia that is not just indulgent but disorienting. “We both felt there was something dangerous about bringing up the old days,” Kathy reports, once she has become carer – social worker – for Ruth, who has made a “donation” of two vital organs.

The greatest myth told about Hailsham is that it will grant three-year deferrals – of donation – to any two students who prove they are in love. Skeptical but finally desperate, Kathy confronts Miss Emily, the old principal. She denies the rumor, but Kathy presses her: “If we’re just going to give donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons? Why all those books and discussions?” Why school at all?

Miss Emily’s reply: “We gave you your childhoods.”

Kathy seems to accept this, but her boyfriend decides he would have preferred the truth to the privileged childhood. The real innocent proves to be not the children, but one of Miss Emily’s colleagues, the superficially bitter character known as Madame. “All the fighting we did on their behalf, what do they know of that?” she asks. “They think it’s God-given.” But these children, like any, distrusted their educations from the start.