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...
The examination's arbitrariness and cultural bias, its association with a normalizing surveillance, and its ridiculous attempts to quantify the unquan...
