The place of religion in public schools : a geographical analysis of U. S. and Canadian case law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis assesses the role that spatial distinctions and understandings of geographical context make to U.S. and Canadian case law concerning religion in public schools.It focuses on the ways in which three concepts -public/private, individual/collective, and placeinfluenced and informed judicial decision-making in 22 leading cases.In a series of rulings since 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that government-directed religious practices have no place in public schools, primarily on the grounds that religion is a uniquely private concern.In addition, a majority of the Court has determined that peer pressure and the disciplinary atmosphere of the school make religious exercises and instruction coercive, even when they are formally voluntary.Since the adoption of the Charter in 1982, Canadian courts have also struck down long-standing traditions of Christian religious exercises in public schools.Their main concern has been to safeguard the individual against collective pressures, emanating from within the community and the school, to conform to majoritarian beliefs.While some religious parents object to secular public education, this has been framed as a matter of uncoerced private conviction, for which the state has no responsibility.Canadian and U.S. courts have also considered whether religious concerns may influence public school curricula.In general, they have determined that government is required to advance secular knowledge through its education system, as opposed to the faith-based perspectives.Such rulings remain deeply controversial, reflecting a broader cultural schism over the role of religion in public life, and the scale at which decisions about education policy should be made.Court rulings are as much concerned with this conflict as they are with strictly legal principles, and often focus on mapping out social spaces, and the boundaries that distinguish them.The law respecting the place of religion in public schools is, then, a fundamentally geographical project, which has not only restructured the spaces of state education, but has relied upon spatial concepts and distinctions to make sense of the issues at stake.As Dawkins (1995: 97) has observed: 'The mere fact that it is possible to frame a question does not make it legitimate or sensible to do so.'
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".