Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the big considerable differences between Charles Dickens’ classic and most pedagogical novel Hard Times (1854) and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), they have much in common as both feature an unorthodox theory of teaching, which turns out to be thoroughly detrimental to their students’ independent, creative thinking. In their most extreme form, the teaching philosophies of their protagonists, Mr Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times and the eponymous character of Miss Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , though much different, lead up to one single result: they do obliterate students’ free thinking and critical capacities. It is simply a system that does reduce students to “little vessels…arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts [or whatever] poured into them until they were full to the brim” (Dickens, 1994, p.2). This article is an explicitly comparative reading of Dickens’ and Spark’s responses to educational philosophies. Whereas Miss Brodie is a nonconformist who goes against the conventional educational methods, Mr Gradgrind relentlessly espouses the traditional education system verbatim by exalting reason and underestimating imagination.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".