Performing Crusoe and Becoming Crusoes: the Pedagogical uses of Robinson Crusoe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We now take for granted that Robinson Crusoe is a suitable and important story for children. The long association of the book with child readers and with so many facets of children’s material culture have linked the two so closely that more than once I have had students express their surprise when they read Defoe’s novel for the first time and discover that it is not, in fact, a children’s book. Taken historically, however, the now assumed appropriateness of the Crusoe story for children along with the putatively inherent appeal of the story for young readers (and viewers, and consumers) were not always taken for granted. Looking back to Defoe’s narrative as it was originally published, it seems striking if not odd that a text that was not written for a child audience — and in which there are no child characters 1 — should come to occupy so central a position in the children’s literature and culture of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The original status of the novel as a text mostly outside the arena of and unconcerned with childhood begs questions about how and why Robinson Crusoe came to be so fully integrated into the pedagogical writing for children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 2 An intuitive answer to these questions might look to the widely acknowledged affection for imaginative adventure that has long been a given in adult assumptions about children’s tastes.
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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 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".