JAC Volume 16 Issue 3

Traditionally, philosophers and historians of knowledge have represented the history of an organized discipline as a progressive evolution whereby new knowledge emerges from disinterested scholarship and is taken up and elaborated according to supposedly objective judgments about its intrinsic validity. Once such a discipline has been established at the university level, it is available as both impetus to an academic subject area in the schools and as a resource for them (Goodson 4-5). But plausible as such versions of disciplinary development may seem, recent historical and sociological research has revealed the conditions of a discipline's emergence to be much more complex. Examining the interrelationships among the political, economic, institutional and ideological contexts in which various disciplines have been formulated, these investigations frequently tell stories similar in outline though varying in myriad details. The stories describe symbiotic relations between ideology and dominant group interests that result in the legitimation of certain objects of inquiry, questions at issue, methodological approaches and reproductive technologies, all having particular effects for constituting the subjectivities of the discipline's members and students (Kuhn, Haskell, Larson, Graff, Miller, Goodson, Applebee, Fitzgerald). These contextualizing investigations have demonstrated that each discipline has been shaped by interacting societal forces whose configuration may vary from discipline to discipline, historical moment to moment, and locale to locale. Though the broad outlines of these stories are similar, the variation in particulars suggests an alternative approach to the investigation of disciplinary formation. While such studies have uncovered significant common patterns, I suggest that the limitless variety in details points to another possibility: historians might also examine the particulars of micro-level situations. Such research might serve as a corrective to analyses that sometimes force dissimilar details into a unified narrative.

Michel Foucault's theory and practice of history warrant such a shift in the locus of inquiry. Foucault's histories, or genealogies, of knowledge do not assume that a discipline (psychology, political science, or, in the case of this article, English studies) describes objective reality or constitutes a coherent system of explanation. Rather than recounting, for instance, the history of mental illness as a progressive accumulation of ever more accurate information about the human psyche, Foucault begins with a radically skeptical move—he questions how mental illness ever came to be constructed as a descriptive category and object of study. Foucault habitually refuses taken-for-granted categories that claim to identify universal conditions, whether they be categories of experience, history, or philosophy, on the grounds that all such categories are constructed in local, particular, contingent conditions. Obviously, if one is to begin by questioning the essential status of universal categories, one cannot utilize them to define or to organize an investigation, as traditional historians of knowledge have. Instead, Foucault turns to local, particular sites of cultural practices to investigate the conditions by which present categories of knowledge have emerged. Following Foucault's lead, we cannot take for granted the category of English literature as the English discipline's subject matter (as does Gerald Graff, 2) if we want to study the formation of English as a discipline. Consequently, this study focuses on the contingent conditions of a particular episode and site in the history of English studies to understand more fully how the category of literature emerged as its central component.

The particular formative episode under study here is the selection of literature as the central interest of the secondary English curriculum in the decade between 1885 and 1895. The site is a series of meetings of school/college organizations to clarify the articulation between institutions of secondary and higher education. I undertake this study with two purposes in mind: first, to challenge the still prevalent assumption that literature is a natural or self-evident subject matter of English studies, and second but equally important, to question still current macro-level explanations of curricular legitimation. With LeClau and Mouffe, who argue that the insufficiency of Marx's macro-level analysis lies in its insistence on a totalizing construction of society into essential, opposing social classes, I begin instead with the premise that there is nothing essential or inevitable about the originary sites of struggles for power. Because social events are plural and indeterminate rather than monolithic and pre-determined, it is necessary to examine each case in its particularities. I intend this effort to open the study of disciplinary history to alternative possibilities that are suppressed by the deterministic bias of macro-level explanations embedded in economic/ideological structures of power. This analysis argues that the legitimation of literature as secondary English's central component was the contingent outcome of local material and discursive practices at work within and between institutional sites in conditions of asymmetrical power relations. The records reveal that in meetings called in the early 1890s to thrash out college/secondary school articulation, literature became central not primarily through intellectual or ideological discussions of its value relative to other potential topics for the English curriculum, but rather in the process of perfecting the technology of testing for college admission. To say this is not to deny that intellectual and ideological concerns are implicated in the eventual privileging of literature, but to draw attention to the significant effects of a particular local event, the ritualization of an examination. To date the site of the examination, the institution's "normalizing gaze" in Foucault's terms, has been entirely overlooked in explanations of literature's dominance in the English curriculum.

Some background is necessary to set the scene for the episode at the center of this study. During the educational upheavals and curricular reforms of the late nineteenth century, nearly revolutionary changes occurred in both higher and secondary education. The private eastern college with its classical curriculum taught mostly in Latin was supplanted by the research university, and the public high school separated itself institutionally from both the college and the primary school. At that time, English as well as many other now familiar subject areas competed for space in the modern institutions. However, English advocates had a different task from those of most other subject areas. At the new universities, the task facing subject areas like social studies and the hard and applied sciences was to carve out a departmental site for their acknowledged subject matter. English, conversely, inherited an institutional site from its discredited predecessor, classical rhetoric, but its traditional content was now considered invalid. The project of English advocates, then, was to construct an alternative content to classical rhetoric that could be defended as a legitimate subject within the constraints of the modern research institution. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, discussions raged in professional journals and meetings and at the sites of hiring and job descriptions over which of the contending possibilities should prevail. Among the competitors were philology; literary appreciation; linguistics; literary genres; aesthetics and poetics; classical rhetoric itself; logic; elocution and composition. At the beginning of the century's last decade, English proponents had reached agreement upon only one point—the primary responsibility for teaching composition belonged to the schools (Fitzgerald 143).

During that same decade the population of high schools is estimated to have doubled, and growth was to continue at exponential rates for the next thirty years (Krug). The state of English in the schools was at least as chaotic as in the colleges. According to one survey of the field, before 1870 "English as we know it today was a non-existent subject in the high schools" (Hays 10). But by the 1890s, fifteen years after Harvard instituted its writing requirement for admission, English studies had received so much attention that Samuel Thurber, Headmaster of Boston Girls' School, could list numerous possibilities for English's content in the secondary schools. In an article for The School Review he catalogued

Just as English had no coherent subject matter, its teachers lacked specialized training. At the college level, those occupying the discredited site of classical rhetoric would probably have completed a typical four year college course consisting of studies in Greek and Latin, mathematics, history, logic, theology, moral philosophy, rhetoric, oratory and forensics (Graff 19, 22). Literature written in the English language was considered a pastime, not a topic to be taught in college courses. At the high school level, a teacher's educational preparation might have ended with high school, or it might have included part or all of a one- or two-year normal school course, or maybe some college courses or perhaps even a college degree. It is impossible to generalize about teacher preparation from data available because of both the lack of such records and the diversity of institutional conditions. But some sense of it can be gathered from the data available for the 1895-1896 school year on Steele High School in Dayton, Ohio, whose principal, Malcolm Booth, submitted a detailed report of the school at the end of his first year. An urban high school with 846 students, Steele would have been at the top of the status ladder in public education, a ladder anchored by the rural ungraded elementary school. At Steele in 1896, 54% of the faculty had graduated from college, 15% had attended either normal school or college, and the remainder had finished high school (Cuban 32-33).

While education enhanced upward mobility and male gender guaranteed higher wages at any point in the hierarchy, the most important factors for both status and salary were moving from rural to urban schools, from ungraded to graded schools, and from lower grades to a graded high school. Administrative positions did not provide as much salary differential as moving from the elementary grades to high school and often meant merely adding administrative duties to a full teaching load. Labaree traces the work history of Samuel Thurber (quoted above) as one of several typical examples of a teacher's rise on the late nineteenth century career ladder. He progressed from an ungraded grammar school to an ungraded high school, to principalships at several city high schools until he finally became headmaster of Boston Girls High School, where he remained for over 20 years until retirement (172). The job titles suggest to readers a century later that he was mainly an administrator, but his contributions to the discussions of the time make it clear that his primary vocation was teacher.

The point of articulation between the still inchoate secondary schools and new universities was the college entrance exam. Prior to 1874 the only languages tested for college admission were Latin and Greek, although a knowledge of formal English grammar had been required by several colleges since 1819 when the College of New Jersey (Princeton) included it. However, with the increase of instruction in the vernacular after the Civil War, students' written English fell under the gaze of the institution. The results would be far-reaching. It was Charles William Eliot, the innovative president of Harvard, whose clarion call in his Inaugural Address of 1869 alerted the university to the "problem" of vernacular English:

Far from objecting to teaching writing in the vernacular, school people are recorded as quite willing to accept the responsibility. Yet, by the end of the 1890s, the entrance exams treated writing as a skill to be checked incidentally as examiners read responses to questions about subject matter areas, and literature had been promoted to the status of subject. Minutes of the meetings in which professors and teachers discussed college/secondary school articulation in English make it clear that this change resulted not primarily from discussions of the relative ideological or academic values of composition and literature, but emerged from the process of perfecting the testing technology.

Throughout the 1890s, various regional and national groups organized meetings to grapple with articulation between secondary schools and the colleges cum universities in all subject areas deemed academic by the colleges. For English those meetings were concentrated in the years 1892-1895, and the major players were the New England Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools (NEACPS), the Association of the Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland, and the National Education Association (NEA) in its role as sponsor of the Committee of Ten. The minutes of the meetings of these groups, though vulnerable to the physical limitations of the human ears and hands that recorded them, are surprisingly detailed.

Over the fifteen years that the English entrance exam proliferated following Harvard's implementation, secondary teachers' reactions were increasingly marked by frustration. It is not difficult to understand why if one looks at how the examination question was constructed and administered. In the first few years of the spread of the requirement, each college wrote its own question and made up its own list of readings upon which the writing would be judged. By 1893 some regularity had been achieved in the exam's wording via a college-organized committee called The Commission of New England Colleges on Admissions. J.H. Penniman, a schoolman, reports that the English question on exams was "usually stated somewhat as follows":

Though this phrasing of the question might have been fairly consistent from college to college by 1893, the reading lists were not: each college had its own list, and the list would vary from year to year. The multiple reading lists became completely unmanageable when a teacher had students who were applying to several different colleges.

In addition, the hints about standards to be applied in grading the examinations were, if anything, more vague in this version than in the original Harvard question. The references to criteria for correctness are omitted and with them the clear focus on writing as the skill being tested. Instead, the only hint of a grading standard refers to the composition's expected content—it will show that the student has read the prescribed works "intelligently." Still present are the samples of bad grammar to be corrected, suggesting that grammaticality would be judged separately from the writing sample. The examination was a source of great confusion among school people. Engaging on the field of "play of questions and answers," as Foucault put it, school people began discussions that would eventually delineate the parameters of an operational technology of examination for English.

Paramount in the discussion of regularization was the issue of subject matter. School people were bewildered about what the colleges intended to test. Those who had conducted the school surveys mentioned above were quite certain that the aim of the exams was to test writing competence. Emerson, the Cornell professor who surveyed his freshman students, echoed the original Harvard emphasis; "While the teaching of English [in the schools] should be improved in many ways, special attention must be given to composition" (Emerson 108). The Massachusetts committee of school people was also certain that the admissions exams showed "clearly that the chief end sought by the colleges is increased facility in writing" (Parmenter, Collar and Groce 602). The discourse on entrance requirements in the early 1890s reveals, however, that the focus on composition was neither universally understood nor consistently applied by the colleges.

The school people's frustration over the ambiguity and inconsistency of the entrance exams was expressed in articles in journals like The Academy and The School Review and at gatherings of the NEACPS and the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland. At one of the first meetings to open the floor to the issue, the annual NEACPS gathering held at Yale University in October 1893, a clearly exasperated schoolman complained, "We [may] very likely in this morning's session find out what the colleges want, or find out something about it. Up to the present time preparatory teachers can't find out. I attribute it largely to the faulty method of examination" (NEACPS Proceedings 1893, 629). Another teacher, Cecil Bancroft, restated the issue in more measured tones: "There has been some difficulty on the part of the schools in adjusting themselves to the new requirement; partly because they have not understood the purpose of the examination, and partly because the examination itself has been somewhat inconsistent" (NEACPS Proceedings 1893, 630). William C. Collar, Headmaster at the Latin School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, provided more detail about his experience with the exams: "The results, year after year, of the examinations were surprising and discouraging to the boys themselves" as they clearly were to Collar. He complained that the most promising boys received no exemplary marks, but "about the tenth or fifteenth boy of the class, who never in the world showed a spark of originality, who wrote only passably, and that always so, never by any accident wrote anything of positive excellence, received a credit [a mark of distinction]." Collar continues with growing irritation: "Well, if that were a solitary instance, I would think nothing of it; but in my experience, that has been going on now for about fifteen years, and it seems to me there must be something wrong somewhere" (NEACPS Proceeding; 1893, 629).

Collar's ire focused on the exam's inability to accurately identify proficient writers. At the following year's meeting, a schoolman identified in the minutes only as Mr. Lowell elaborated on the problem. He detailed the story of a student whose writing he knew to be superior but who misidentified the literary scene about which he was to write and ended up describing the wrong incident. The result was that he was "conditioned," not because his writing was poor, Lowell claims, but because he did not remember the literary work accurately (NEACPS Proceedings 1894, 675-676). If Lowell correctly understood the situation, the examiner, whatever he/she may have believed about writing as a separately measurable skill, could not divorce the skill from the accuracy of the statement about literature.

Some school people felt that knowledge of literature was the proper focus of the examination no matter what the colleges intended. At the 1893 NEACPS Meeting, A.L. Goodrich, a school teacher, declared:

The examination as it was then constituted was inoperable as a regulating technology. Foucault's discussion of school examinations implies that an effective exam requires a correspondence, or at least an apparent correspondence, between the feature tested by the instrument and the feature to be observed, and a regularity, or at least the appearance of regularity, in the outcomes of the examination. As the chaotic conditions of the English entrance examinations illustrate, without these minimal characteristics, the testing apparatus loses its authority to situate individuals among their peers in order to distribute them hierarchically. In the case of the English examination, the test failed to make visible the vehicle (literature? writing?) for differentiation and thereby undermined any possibility for regularity in outcome. This destroyed the grounding in rationality by which the teachers, being constituted as functionaries or officers in a still forming educational hierarchy, would operationalize the examination and by which the students would be subjected to its regulation.

The blizzard of regulatory activity in the first half of the 1890s is evidence that the disfunction of the testing process had reached crisis proportions in the minds of many school people. In 1893 before the October NEACPS meeting, at least two proposals had been put forth for revising the examination, one in a School Review article written by schoolman J.H. Penniman (quoted above) and one developed by an NEACPS committee appointed to confer about the entrance exam with the Commission of Colleges in New England on Admissions. Penniman's proposal seems to have informed subsequent versions of the exam though it was never adopted in full. Its innovation was in the way it systematized the subject matter under observation. He divided the exam into four parts: I) a series of compositions on assigned literary texts to be written at school under the teacher's supervision (following the "physics method" in Penniman's terms; a portfolio, in current terminology); 2) a composition on "some simple subject, not necessarily connected with the books read" to test the ability "to express himself clearly and correctly" in English; 3) questions about authors' biographies and dates and 4) exercises in correcting bad English (Penniman 467-468). Termed "the physics method" by analogy to laboratory reports produced in the schools for entrance in physics, the portfolio part not only, as Penniman argued, afforded a more detailed examination of knowledge of literature than possible in one test written in a single sitting, it had the added advantage of appropriating the prestige of the testing methods of the sciences. Moreover, Penniman's division of the single question into a four part examination promised to lay open students' knowledge of literature and writing skills, formerly folded together, for more direct observation.

The NEACPS entrance examination committee's revision of the question, similar enough to Penniman's to suggest cross-semination, was presented at the 1893 meeting and was the occasion for the outbursts quoted above. It turned out that so much time was taken to vent frustrations and so few of the members had had the opportunity to read the proposal ahead of time that it was tabled for further study. Though parallel to Penniman's proposal in many ways, the NEACPS' statement paid more attention to supervision of the portfolio:

It is important to note here that the committee's initial defense of its proposal embeds implications that go beyond the mere structure of an examination. Discussing the "physics method," the committee argued that portfolios would secure "one important thing that has never yet been secured: Every candidate must read the books and write an essay, one or more on each book, or his teacher cannot certify him" (625). As they articulated their own functions into their attempt to operationalize the colleges' techniques of observation, these teachers, already inserted into the educational hierarchy between the authority of the colleges and the mass of students to be regulated, were constituting themselves as the agents of surveillance. By detailing the mechanisms of the "normalizing gaze," these newly constituted functionaries were beginning to rationalize the relations of power and knowledge in their subject area. The question of their agency in constructing this emerging subjectivity will be addressed later.

Concurrent with the NEACPS meetings, work on entrance examinations was in progress at other sites The subject area conferences of the Committee of Ten, appointed to address issues of college/secondary articulation across academic subject areas, met in the waning days of 1892, but their reports were not published until after the 1692 NEACPS meeting. It has long been noted that the Committee of Ten was dominated by college men (Krug, Sizer), though each subject area conference included a few representatives of the schools in their numbers. Out of the English Conference came a set of working principles similar to those embodied in the proposals outlined above, though with yet more attention to the details of testing techniques. Regarding literature, the Conference recommended that

The degree of regularization achieved by the Joint Committee's policy compared to previous efforts is remarkable. Regarding composition, the original grading criteria of the Harvard exam—compositions must be acceptable in spelling, punctuation, idiom and paragraphing—though dropped from typical questions of the early nineties, were restored and contextualized as features graders would consider in the course of reading responses to the literature questions. The exercises in correcting bad grammar, objected to not because of a change of heart about the importance of grammar but because they were impossible to grade consistently, were dropped. The task of explaining the Joint Committee's rationale for its decisions to the NEACPS fell to Professor C.T. Winchester of Wesleyan University. He explained the decision to drop the grammar exercises as follows:

Previous suggestions for a short composition on a general topic seem to have been dropped in response to a theoretical consideration: that the arhetorical conditions of writing such a composition (it lacked specific purpose or audience) by themselves produced bad writing, making the exercise an inaccurate representation of the student's ability (NEACPS 1893, 664; Committee of Ten, 94). Though writing was not dropped from the exam's normalizing gaze, it was made less visible by removing testing mechanisms that had proved ineffective. Instead of employing these ineffective techniques, the writing to be observed was contextualized in subject-matter questions. The irony of the situation is that, invalid as they were, the very mechanisms that had conveyed the message that writing was being tested—the short essay on a topic of choice and the exercises in bad English—were removed in the attempt to make the examination more legitimate.

The result of these regularizing technologies was a complete reversal of the focus of the original Harvard examination in English so that literature, not composition as originally intended, became the subject matter tested. Key to this reversal was the fact that for the participants in these discussions, literature was more susceptible to rationalization and systematization than composition. There were several reasons that literature appeared to be more manageable. First, the reading lists could be controlled. Whereas previously, individual colleges had each selected their own reading lists and changed them from year to year, the Joint Committee's document prescribed a uniform list which would change moderately and predictably over time, and would, moreover, be reevaluated at set intervals. The materials to be examined were further delimited by breaking the examination down into two types of questions, each with its own reading list. The first, allowing much latitude in topic selection and requiring short answers of a paragraph or two, was devised in part as a compromise with secondary teachers who argued that students should be encouraged to read for appreciation rather than close study. The second type of question was designed to elicit the lengthier and more closely reasoned responses desired by college philologists. It is interesting to note that the portfolio, originally proposed as a mechanism for making the testing of detailed knowledge of literature more feasible, is now included as an alternative for the first category. One might conjecture that the portfolio was viewed as too uncontrollable, threatening again the order that the revision was intended to guarantee to the examination process.

The results of the considerable resources in time and materials devoted to the revision of the English entrance exam fell far short of fulfilling everyone's expectations. However, at the conferences that met to ratify it, the revision was hailed as the harbinger of system and stability. School people commented that the two reading lists made literature as a subject area more tractable, providing some guidance in how to apportion time and topics of discussion. As well, the lists' divisions into the distinct historical periods and genres afforded the subject a degree of coherence and order. Some felt that the criteria mentioned in the statement clarified the colleges' basis for judgments. One speaker noted that as a result of the Joint Committee's statement,

Foucault points out the significance of the school examination in a disciplinary regime. As summarized by Cousins and Hussain, its end is the "taxonomic classification of the relevant population and its placement into categories and ranks" (185) in order to increase the population's use to the society, or in Foucault's words, to "constitut[e] a productive force whose effect had to be superior to the sum of elementary forces that composed it" (Discipline and Punish 163). Foucault did not elaborate the techniques of the examination as he did of disciplinary punishment; however, parallels between the two can be identified. Analyzing the economy of punishment in detail, Foucault traced the eighteenth and nineteenth century reforms in the penal regime to what was becoming an inefficient tolerance of illegalities. Irregularities and lacunae in enforcement resulted in excessive punishment in some instances and openly countenancing transgressions in others. As property became the basis of the capitalist economic system, to continue the haphazard enforcement of property rights became economically and politically untenable (Discipline and Punish 85). These conditions led to reforms resulting in a penal semiotics that relied on the representation of punishment as the consistent and inevitable consequence of a transgression. Foucault points out that the process was far from simple: "Codification, definition of offenses, the fixing of a scale of penalties, rules of procedure, [and] definition of the role of magistrates" (102) were all required to construct the regularities necessary for such a representation to take hold.

The parallels to the examination as a mechanism of disciplinary power are clear. By analogy with the larger disciplinary regime, the examination, to be at all efficient, must not arbitrarily categorize populations leaving inexplicable gaps and irregularities, but must rationally classify, place and document its subjects. In the case of English studies, the colleges has implemented an examination before the "discipline" had reached consensus over what constituted its subject matter. Therefore, examiners could not consistently delineate the parameters that differentiated normality from deviance, making the testing mechanism inoperable. The mechanism had to be regularized. This is the process traced above, and it culminated in the design of a device systematic enough to avoid the lacunae and irregularities that had led to the secondary teachers' frustrated charges of irrationality.

The revision of this particular examination was merely a local episode; in he century since, while the categories of literature have remained fairly stable (divisions by historical periods and genre) every title with the exception of the Shakespearean oeuvre has changed, and testing procedures have shifted from essay writing to objective tests and back again. Rajchman (1985) reminds us that for Foucault "no single episode, no single network is historically necessary or irreversible" but no network's "localized episodes may be inscribed in history except by the effects that it induces on the entire network in which it is caught up" (66). The ritualization of the English entrance examination inscribed certain formulations of English in the secondary schools, which, though not immutable, in effect produced the subject of English. By such processes the technologies of power can be described as productive.

That the new examination provided teachers with the framework of a course is immediately apparent from their comments at the meetings to ratify the Joint Committee's revision. One schoolman, Charles S. Knox, responded, "It [is] a good thing . . . to set a small definite amount of an author to be very carefully prepared with the examination questions in view requiring thorough knowledge and exact thought, and then also to read larger portions rapidly and sympathetically, out of which topics may be selected of wider reach, with perhaps a little more of literary flavor in them" (NEACPS Proceedings 1893, 635). Clearly, for Knox the curriculum being shaped will center on the readings for close study. Wilson Ferrand opined, "The report before us sets up a definite standard. Clearness and accuracy are the qualities of style to be secured. What sort of study of the books is desired, is stated as explicitly as is wise or possible" (Proceedings of the Association of Middle States and Maryland, 97). He too believed that the revision clarified and regularized his task.

The singular episode described here is not the entire explanation of the formation of secondary English. Indeed, at the same meetings in which the Joint Committee's proposal was ratified, new battles ensued about the specifics of who would determine and what would comprise secondary English's subject matter. But certain parameters had been set. Having normalized and regularized their examination, the colleges would require students to have knowledge of certain privileged texts. In practice, secondary teachers, resist as they might, would prepare those students who intended to continue to college (and often others) to perform successfully on entrance examinations. And this meant that literature would continue to be privileged subject matter in secondary English classes. The story of the development of literature as secondary English's central intellectual component is at least in part the story of a surveillance technology configuring a substantive content amenable to normalization rather than a history of a body of knowledge establishing its intellectual coherence and legitimacy. In Foucault's terms, the systematizing power exercised through the technology of the examination produced the substance of the school subject. That is, the subject matter was a result of regularizing the testing mechanism, not a cause.

Hierarchy, the Examination, and Subjectivity

In the opening epigram Foucault suggests studying the characters and their roles in the story of the examination, but he does not in general allow much space in his networks of technologies weaving individuals into their proper classifications and positions, for individuals to function. In the story traced above, individuals are already divided into three strata, students, secondary school people and college or university professors. The students, at first subjected to an irrational and inefficient examination, finally became objects of the normalizing gaze of a regularized mechanism that documented their display of knowledge of selected literary works and to some extent the surface of their writing as part of the larger classifying technology to mark their societal placement. Productive as investigations into the construction of students' subjectivities, as well as into those of the dominant group, the professors, would be, the characters of interest for the present study are those individuals in the middle, the school people.

A strong Foucauldian reading of this group's subjectivity is that its members are constituted as disciplinary technicians in a hierarchical system whose task is to ensure the proper (rational) functioning of their location for the efficiency of the system. Evidence that this role indeed constituted the subjectivity into which they were being inserted is found in the emotional tone, even coming through the recorder's shorthand, of their complaints about the arbitrariness, ambiguity and unpredictability of the early English examinations. The responsibility for operationalizing the exam was taken seriously. Positioned hierarchically between the observed and the observers, they were interpellated as functionaries responsible for ensuring the efficacy of the surveillance.

But evidence also exists for a weaker Foucauldian reading. The school people were able to act with limited agency within the confines of their hierarchical positioning. Subjected by the technology of the examination to the vicissitudes of the colleges, a rung above the secondary people hierarchically by virtue of their power to directly control the fate of the students and indirectly that of the teachers themselves, the school people struggled to maximize the modicum of unappropriated power left to them. They asserted some rational control over their own destinies by focusing on the exam's destiny. Their success in modifying the examination apparatus may be read as evidence that the productive force of the technologies of power is not unidirectional—that the human subject, even in subordinate positions, interacts with the technologies. The school people's list of victories is notable: the subject matter to be tested was codified to achieve consistency and predictability; lists of readings were separated into two groups to mollify teachers who wanted secondary students to focus on the appreciation of literature, not on scholarly study; exercises in correcting bad grammar were discarded; and some indication was given of the grounds for evaluation of the examinations. In this weaker reading, the school people are agents who could affect the subject matter of their discipline as well as the phrasing of the examination within the limits set by the institutional hierarchy as American education became systematized vertically.

This analysis of disciplinary formation and subjectivity raises questions about the agency and processes by which change occurs. There is no doubt that throughout the nineteenth century American education underwent significant change at every conceivable level of analysis. This study intends to open space for alternatives to structuralist explanations of change and thereby to alternative results to those predicted by structural analyses. This micro-analysis has illuminated one site where subalterns were able to negotiate limited change to ameliorate their own conditions, to make experience a bit more predictable for their students, and to shape the content of their discipline within circumscribed boundaries. The construction of the entrance examination is only one of many temporal and/or spatial sites at which the formation of the discipline and subjectivities of its members and clients can be studied. Others might include sites of interaction between teachers, textbooks and classroom practices; between teachers and their own training processes and training institutions; between teachers, their peers, and those above and below them in the educational hierarchy; between teachers and their students; or between teachers and their governing agencies. Although asymmetrical relations of power will obtain at all of these sites, focus on the details of interaction will illuminate the productivity as well as the oppression of those relations.