<i>The Simpsons</i> as a satirical portrayal of neoliberal influence on public education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rooted in the scholarship of Michael W. Apple, this study examined how The Simpsons portrayed neoliberalism’s influence on public education prior to the introduction of ‘No Child Left Behind’. A framework of neoliberalism as it relates to public education was built using four specific categories put forth by Apple: privatisation, marketisation, performativity, and the enterprising individual. These categories formed the basis of a conceptual content analysis that sampled the first 12 seasons of The Simpsons. What was found was that while The Simpsons tended to critique education in a manner similar to what neoliberal ideology contends, when the programme’s schooling enveloped neoliberal values and reforms believed to be a ‘fix’ for education, schooling was not improved but rather further damaged. This cynicism towards neoliberal reforms suggested that The Simpsons provides wider opportunity to expose and discuss the folly of neoliberalism’s influence on public education.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".