Rank systems make each pupil perpetually mobile within a grid of aligned positions.

Evidence

In the eighteenth century, ‘rank’ begins to define the great form of distribution of individuals in the educational order: rows or ranks of pupils in the class, corridors, courtyards; rank attributed to each pupil at the end of each task and each examination; the rank he obtains from week to week, month to month, year to year; an alignment of age groups, one after another; a succession of subjects taught and questions treated, according to an order of increasing difficulty. And, in this ensemble of compulsory alignments, each pupil, according to his age, his performance, his behaviour, occupies sometimes one rank, sometimes another; he moves constantly over a series of compartments – some of these are ‘ideal’ compartments, marking a hierarchy of knowledge or ability, others express the distribution of values or merits in material terms in the space of the college or classroom. It is a perpetual movement in which individuals replace one another in a space marked off by aligned intervals. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 226

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Spatial assignment controls pupil movement and verifies each individual’s location. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 227; Rank itself is produced by the temporal series organizing exercises — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 240

Related

• Spatial assignment controls pupil movement and verifies each individual’s location. (similarity 0.89)
• Rank itself is produced by the temporal series organizing exercises (similarity 0.86)
• Classroom placement was used to control pupils through engineered social proximity. (similarity 0.80)
• Discipline values the act of positioning itself, not which position an individual holds (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Spatial assignment controls pupil movement and verifies each individual’s location. #expands (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 227
• Rank itself is produced by the temporal series organizing exercises #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 240