Representations of Religion in the Ontario Secondary School Curriculum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian province of Ontario has a long and complicated history with religion in its K-12 education system, culminating in a status-quo where public funding is provided to schools offering either a mandatory, confessionally Roman Catholic form of religious education or a non-mandatory, secular form of “education about religion”. In an effort to better understand the present state of religion-related instruction in Ontario public education, this study examines the representation of religion across relevant portions of the Ontario secondary school curriculum that are shared by both Roman Catholic and secular public schools. Content analysis showed that insofar as mandatory teaching elements are concerned, the curriculum engages with religion across a range of different subject matter contexts but also entirely within courses that Ontario high school students are not required to take. Of particular note is the representation of religion as having apparently no bearing on the principle thrust of Canadian history since 1945. Spirituality, as well as other matters which might reasonably be considered religion-adjacent, are represented as being integral components of Indigenous Canadian cultures, with the distinctive term “world view” frequently employed as an analogue for such topics in this context.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".