Pedagogical economies : the examination and the Victorian literary man
"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." "Pedagogical Economies 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. These writers 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."
Print Book, English, 2000
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2000
Criticism, interpretation, etc
255 pages ; 23 cm
9780804737159, 0804737150
44768758
1. Only a test: the social functions of the examination; 2. Public money, private subjects: HMI Matthew Arnold; 3. Laborer and hire: Trollope, Northcote-Trevelyan, and The Three Clerks; 4. 'In the way of school': Dickens's Our Mutual Friend; 5. 'Preached to death by a mad governess': Ruskin's anti-exam; Epilog: money for nothing; Notes; Index.