Grace Talent Merit Poor Students Clerical Careers Professional Id… 9780521350419

Grace, Talent, and MeritPoor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany\nAuthor(s): Anthony J. La Vopa\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521350419, 978-0521350419\nSynopsis\nPoor 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.