“Proper Objects of This Institution”: Working Families, Children, and the British & Canadian School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Established in 1822 “for the education of the children of the labouring class,” Montreal’s British and Canadian School Society enabled working families of various ethnic backgrounds to have their children receive free schooling in a non-denominational setting. Located at the edge of the old town in a purpose-built structure, the British and Canadian School figured prominently within the array of early educational establishments studied by Bruce Curtis, Andrée Dufour, and others. In the wake of the rebellions in Lower Canada and the resulting separation of institutions along religious lines, the school became increasingly identified with the Protestant community and in 1866 was formally incorporated into the city’s emerging Protestant school system. Despite this apparent loss of its non-denominational character, the school continued to attract substantial numbers of children from Catholic and Jewish families, the latter resulting from an agreement between the synagogues and the school board. The school also retained its particular attraction for working-class families, who appear to have applied regularly with some determination to see their children exposed to learning even if only for short periods. A Registry of Admissions to the British and Canadian School from the mid-1870s reveals a pattern whereby schooling formed part of long-term strategy within the working class family economy; as such, it sheds light on the work of historians such as Bettina Bradbury and Terry Copp. The Registry also permits analysis of the school population by gender, ethnicity, age, place of residence, and academic competence.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".