No Longer a ‘Last Resort’: The End of Corporal Punishment in the Schools of Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In 1971, following a protracted and tumultuous debate, the Toronto Board of Education formally abolished the use of corporal punishment in its schools – the first Ontario board to do so. Corporal punishment continued to be employed elsewhere in Ontario and throughout Canada well into the 1980s, and the use of physical discipline was prohibited in all Canadian schools only in 2004, following a ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada. Why did educators and legislators defend corporal punishment for so long, and why did the tide turn in the last part of the twentieth century? Concentrating on legal and political dynamics, this article explores the ways in which the Toronto Board of Education grappled with the issue of corporal punishment in the three decades before its abolition. It seeks to situate the story of Toronto's approach to school discipline on the broader social landscape on which the battle over corporal punishment was conducted. It concludes that the particular configuration of the Toronto Board of Education following trustee elections in 1969 strongly affected the shape and outcome of the corporal punishment debate.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".