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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Grace, Talent, and Merit
  • Cited by 33
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2010
Print publication year:
1988
Online ISBN:
9780511665110
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511665110
Subjects:
Area Studies, European History after 1450, History, European Studies
Information

Book description

Poor students experienced a kind of upward mobility that was not uncommon in old-regime Europe. They were also objects of controversy. and as such they reveal the many dimensions of the issue of opening careers to talent. At stake were socially and politically sensitive questions about the relative importance of nature and nurture, of natural talent and 'birth', in realizing human potential; about the proper reconciliation of collective imperatives and individual freedom, of hierarchical stability and progress; about how national systems of education should be structured; about the kind and degree of upward mobility the society and the culture needed and could tolerate. This 1988 book shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience for men whose importance is still celebrated today, as well as for members of the educated elite who were and have remained obscure.

Reviews

"...Grace, Talent, and Merit is an original book which ingeniously weaves together information from a variety of sources ranging from sermons to autobiographies to private correspondence to works of philosophy. This book makes a valuable contribution to the history of education in its broadest sense." Katharine D. Kennedy, History of Education Quarterly

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