Pedagogical Economies: The Examination and the Victorian Literary ManStanford University Press, 2000 - 255 pages The examination's arbitrariness and cultural bias, its association with a normalizing surveillance, and its ridiculous attempts to quantify the unquantifiable have been perfectly obvious to generations of authors, educators, and even bureaucrats yet it still dominates both British and American education systems. This book explores the examination's figurative power for nineteenth-century discourses of subject formation and value through readings of works by Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, writers who were active during the 1850s and 1860s, when the examination began to structure a range of British institutions, from the working-class primary school to the Indian Civil Service. Although they routinely resisted the spread of formal educational testing, their work reveals a fascination with the examination's unique ability to make reading and writing visible as value-able labor. As an element in literary discourse as topos, plot structure, and figurative intersection the examination remaps relations between the subject and knowledge, the person and the state, masculine self-discipline and feminine self-sacrifice, and intellectual and money economies. The book thus speculates on institutional, sexual, and economic aspects of Victorian professional gentility, as well as contributing to recent debates on Arnold's seductive stupidity, Trollope's "mechanical" realism, Dickens's bourgeois critique of capitalist exchange, and Ruskin's ambivalent attachment to schoolgirls. The economic, erotic, and institutional relationships implicit in educational testing and the debates surrounding it continue to trouble literary critics as well as scholars, administrators, and teachers. Pedagogical Economies can thus shed light on current questions about the relationship between school and society. |
Expressions et termes fréquents
Alaric Alaric's amination Anthony Trollope anti-exam argues Arnold authority Autobiography Bella Boffin Bourdieu bourgeois Bradley Bradley's capital century Charley child civil servants Civil Service classroom competitive critics crystals cultural depicted Dickens Dickens's display domestic Ethics Eugene exam examination exchange expertise extraeconomic feminine Feminism fiction figure Foucault Gaffer gender girls Hexam Ian Hunter ideology inspection Inspector institutional intellectual labor John Ruskin knowledge Lecturer literary literature Lizzie masculine Matthew Arnold mechanical metonymically middle-class moral Mutual Friend nineteenth nineteenth-century nomic Northcote Northcote and Trevelyan Northcote-Trevelyan Northcote-Trevelyan Report novel Office payment by results pedagogical economy plot production profes professional pupils Queens reading relation Reports Revised Code Riderhood role Ruskin Samuel Lipman Sesame Smelser social sphere suggests T]he teacher teaching testing Three Clerks tion Trollope Trollope's Undy University Press Unto This Last Victorian Victorian Literature Wegg Wegg's Winnington working-class writing