TY - BOOK ID - 8734398 TI - Grace, talent, and merit : poor students, clerical careers, and professional ideology in eighteenth-century Germany PY - 1988 SN - 0521350417 0521525144 0511665113 PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Church and education KW - -Educational sociology KW - -Occupational mobility KW - -Professions KW - -Social mobility KW - -Mobility, Social KW - Sociology KW - Career patterns KW - Careers KW - Jobs KW - Professional services KW - Occupations KW - Interprofessional relations KW - Vocational guidance KW - Job mobility KW - Mobility, Occupational KW - Social mobility KW - Education and sociology KW - Social problems in education KW - Society and education KW - Sociology, Educational KW - Education KW - Education and church KW - History KW - -History KW - -Aims and objectives KW - Educational sociology KW - Occupational mobility KW - Professions KW - -Church and education KW - Mobility, Social KW - Aims and objectives KW - Arts and Humanities UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:8734398 AB - 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. ER -