Education as a spectral technology: Corporate culture at work in Ontario‘s schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper addresses the sweeping neoliberal reforms implemented in Ontario’s schools in 2000, and conceptualises them within the terms of ‘millennial capitalism’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2000). A close reading of secondary school curriculum documents and the umbrella policies that shape education from ages 5 to 18 years reveals how students are groomed to identify themselves as workers under construction. This is accomplished by mandating career education that defines lived experience as a ‘career’, articulates an identity for students as workers/producers, and dictates a direct relationship between education and the health of the economy. For students the professed advantages of millennial capitalism come from freedom and choice to navigate a post-secondary future in an abstract market that rewards those who respond to its highs and lows. Despite the drop-out ‘crisis’ that followed the initial reforms, and the next government’s efforts to remediate the damage done, ultimately corporatist/careerist mantras continue to haunt classrooms, shape education, and its aims and goals in Ontario. The analysis offered in this paper aims to help us better understand the resilience of the neoliberal agenda in the current global economic ‘crisis’, in light of ongoing calls for ‘value-for-money’ in delivering public services and overall competitiveness. Ontario’s education system has a reputation internationally as a high-level performer; this positioning in light of the anomalies presented by its policy and curriculum serves as a cautionary tale to countries that connect growth in GDP with the results of its children and youth on standardised tests. Further, it reveals the disparity between statistics at the macro level and life at the level of the classroom.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".