Up Against 'Edutopia': Dr. James Daly's Crusade against the Spectre of Progressive Education, 1968-1983.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over forty years ago, an Ontario Provincial Committee headed by Emmett Hall and Lloyd Dennis released Living and Learning (1968), a bold and provocative progressive reform prescription for the perceived ills afflicting the Ontario public school system. One of the most strident critics of the Hall-Dennis Report was Dr. James Daly, a little known McMaster University English history professor, who responded with a stinging critique in the form of a political pamphlet-sized book entitled Education or Molasses: A Critical Look at the Hall-Dennis Report (1969). While Daly’s little book echoed the essential message of Hilda Neatby’s So Little for the Mind (1953), it never attracted the same popular acclaim. Many Ontario educators from regular classroom teachers to academics sympathized with Daly, but few rallied to his defence in the ensuing public debate. This article explores Dr. Daly’s personal crusade and assesses why it fizzled in the public arena, yet actually helped to turn the tide in the 1980s backlash against the Hall-Dennis brand of ‘romantic progressive’ reform.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".