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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Cathy Shuman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 216 pages.
A certain nervousness should attend any reviewer's account of Cathy Shuman's smart and, I think, necessary book. This is so because Pedagogical Economies teases apart the "rituals of assessment" and thus lays bare the mechanisms that inform, for one thing, the idea of the scholarly book review. But more disturbing still is the timeliness of Shuman's theme. As everyone knows by now, we live in an era of standards-based education, proposals to base teacher salaries on pupil performance on standardized tests, and the theorizing of university education within corporate models. The connection between the nineteenth-century emergence of the examination as a mode of subject formation and our twenty-first-century debates over pedagogy is a matter Shuman herself addresses in her conclusion. On the way to the concluding chapters are very fine and provocative discussions of Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin.
The aim of the book is to show how the examination is "a central ritual of nineteenth-century discourses of subject formation and value" (4), and especially how major nineteenth-century figures were fascinated by the examination--"its ability to make intellectual labor visible, to remap institutional power relations, and to endow cultural capital with exchange value" (5). "Examination" means, in this book, everything from Voluntary School inspections to the "testing" of Bella Wilfer in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-85). This variousness in conceiving of the examination is both engaging...
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