LEARNING NOT TO SPEAK IN TONGUES: THOUGHTS ON THE LIBRARIAN OF BASRA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We explore the nature of knowledge and education and how Islamic traditions have shaped understanding of these matters. We contrast this with contemporary images of “Taliban ‐ like” schools full of rote repetition and harsh, authoritarian literalism. Some of the history of Islamic scholarship venerates a much more generous relationship to knowing. We link these explorations to a recently published children’s picture book, a true story about a librarian in Basra, Iraq, during the recent American invasion. Even if it is a “true story,” we consider what its truth is and whether educators, might or should or could stand by this truth. Key words: Islamic philosophy, curriculum knowledge, knowledge formation, politics and education, multiculturalism Nous explorons ici la nature du savoir et de l ʹ education et comment la tradition islamique a modele leur comprehension. Nous comparons les images contemporaines des ecoles ʺ style Taliban ʺ qui sont faites de ʺ par coeur ʺ et de literalite dure et autoritaire avec certaines ecoles dans l ʹ histoire de l ʹ Islam qui affichent une plus grande generosite face au savoir. Nous etablissons un lien entre ces notions et un livre illustre pour enfants recemment publie, une histoire vecue d ʹ un libraire de Basra, en Iraq, pendant la recente invasion americaine. Meme si cette histoire est une ʺ histoire vraie ʺ , nous considerons sa valeur et nous pensons que les educateurs pourraient accepter cette verite ou meme qu ʹ ils devraient l ʹ accepter. Mots cles: philosophie de l ʹ Islam, la connaissance du curriculum, la formation du savoir, l ʹ education et les politiques, le multiculturalisme
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".