John Clifford, Militant Evangelicals, and the Colonial Model for ‘Secular’ Schools (1870s-1920s)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the time of the enactment of compulsory primary education, the Baptist minister John Clifford, along with other Evangelical pressure groups, advocated for the enforcement of State-funded secular schooling. They defended a ‘secular’ education, i.e. a curriculum infused with a broad Protestant ethos, which should be bestowed upon all children throughout Britain and its empire. For Clifford and militant Evangelicals, British Dominions offered models of State secular schooling because of the effective separation of State and Church within their realms. This article explores the militant Evangelical views on ‘secular’ education, along with the fights waged against (Roman Catholic) denominational schooling. It explores the arguments that enthusiastic Evangelical imperialists brought forward to defend their vision of the ideal Briton – a Protestant citizen free from clerical influence. It also studies the Roman Catholics’ reactions to Evangelical attacks against their separate school system, and investigates the Manitoba School Issue as a test case confronting two opposing worldviews on education, the State, and the Churches.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".