Search

1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the lecture series on Women’s and Gender Studies at Bucknell University. I would like to thank my stimulating audience at Bucknell. Special thanks go to Professors Katherine Faull at Bucknell and Kym Morrison at Moravian College for their critical and learned reading of an earlier version of the text. I am especially grateful to the Gotha Research Library and the University of Erfurt for the Merian Scholarship that allowed me to do research in Gotha, Jena, Weimar and Schnepfenthal for this study. The Faculty Research and Development Committee of Moravian College has generously supported my research in Germany. I thank Judith Green for her great editorial assistance. All translations are mine. This study probes the ways in which a meritocratic system of student evaluation emerged in German educational institutions in the late eighteenth century. By probing the case of the Schnepfenthal Institute, founded in 1784 by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, the author suggests that the system of assessment was not only an outcome of meritocratic rationalization but also was influenced by traditional forms of domination. Rather than describing the traditional as monarchical we should see its patriarchal, gendered nature. It is this larger patriarchal context, it is argued, that helps us understand the ways Schnepfenthal and its kindred institutions introduced their systems of student assessment: they were amalgamations of meritocratic aspirations and traditional pressures of patriarchal domination. The research is based on extensive work on archival and other primary materials from Schnepfenthal and the Research Library of Gotha. The study starts with a description of the Schnepfenthal Institute by showing the educational context of the Meritentafel. Then attention is shifted to the practices that allowed Salzmann and his associates to assess students. The last section attempts to explain these practices by analyzing the patriarchal setting of Schnepfenthal which was so important to Salzmann. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]