I DREAMED I SAW HILDA NEATBY LAST NIGHT: SO LITTLE FOR THE MIND AFTER 50 YEARS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been nearly fifty years since the publication of "So Little for the Mind," Hilda Neatby's controversial conservative attack on what she understood as "progressive education." This paper argues that Neatby's book remains important reading despite its limitations and its context. Neatby's work represents what I call a "big dream" in educational thought. It is an educational text that is passionately anti-scientific in its structure and argument; it represents a fundamental liberal humanist critique of educational theory and research. Neatby's work is important for the way in which it initiates contemporary conservative educational critique in Canada, but also because it anticipates post-structural arguments about the radical intrusiveness of a focus on the "whole child" in the context of the modern educational apparatus. Finally, I critique some of Neatby's key assumptions and relate these to an autobiographical account of the educational experience of one small-town Nova Scotian family from the 1920s.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".