Egerton Ryerson and educational policy borrowing: aspects of the development of Ontario's system of public instruction, 1844 - 1876
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Literature within the field of Comparative Education often cautions against the transfer of foreign policies from one context to another. Despite this warning, Ontario’s public education system is said to have been based on an eclectic mix of foreign examples: teacher training institutes replicating Prussian Seminaries, school financing and the role of the chief superintendent and board of education as in the states of Massachusetts and New York, and using the Irish curriculum. This study conceptualises the manner in which these foreign elements became part of the 1846 school law and the reaction of stakeholders in and outside of government. The period covered by this study, 1844 – 1876, corresponds to Egerton Ryerson’s time as Chief Superintendent of education in Ontario. Extensive archival research of incoming and outgoing correspondence from the department of education, district council meeting minutes, newspapers, and local superintendent, inspector and trustee reports revealed contrasting opinions. On the one hand, sources indicated favourable results: increased pupil attendance, number of facilities and money raised to fund schools. There is also evidence that many foreign educationalists not only requested resources from Ontario’s board but aspired to emulate features of the province’s reformed education system in their own nations. This study’s finding of a reverse cross-national attraction’ is a new contribution to Canadian historical studies. However, many resented features of the school bill. Critics called the superintendent and board’s method of organisation ‘Prussian despotism’ in Canadian schools; others argued the injustice of property tax to fund free schools and the cost burden of importing Irish textbooks. An original conceptual framework has been produced to review the manner in which Ryerson defended the new bill and the internalisation of these foreign policies and practices. This framework may serve as an analytical device for those engaged in researching educational policy borrowing.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".