Private conscience and the public purse: a comparison and explanation of the law relating to state funding of religious schools in Canada and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the United States, government provision of funding or other aid to private religious schools is a hugely controversial issue, and one which has spawned a voluminous and complex jurisprudence. In Canada, by contrast, the debate is much more muted and generally does not find its way into the courtroom. What exactly are the legal differences between the two countries when it comes to state aid for religious schools? And what accounts for these differences? This paper will be organized around these two questions. Part II compares and contrasts the legal doctrines relating to state aid for religious education on both sides of the 49th parallel. Part III provides an argument, drawing on historical, social and philosophical differences between the two countries, for why the American and Canadian law in this area differ so markedly. It is contended that the Canadian acceptance and the American rejection of direct state funding of religious schools can be explained with reference to differences that exist between the two countries along five dimensions: the countries' respective founding moments; demographic realities; perspectives on how best to achieve unity; fears of religious tyranny; and concerns over protecting religion from the state.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".