“Improvident and Profligate”: The <i>Alexandra Readers</i> Controversy in Saskatchewan, 1908–1909
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the politics and economics surrounding textbook provision in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan in the first decade of the twentieth century, a period in which debates around the publication and provision of textbooks raged in Canada. It focuses on the 1908 contract between the Saskatchewan Department of Education and the Morang Educational Company of Toronto involving the Alexandra Readers. Frederick Haultain, leader of the opposition Provincial Rights Party, used the contract as a club to beat James Calder, commissioner of education for the ruling Liberal government. Haultain claimed that the contract had been offered to Morang because he and John Cameron Saul, editor in chief of the company, had been “college chum[s].” He also claimed that the majority of the textbook selection committee actually had favoured the readers submitted by rival Toronto publisher the Canada Publishing Company. As a result of Haultain’s accusations in the Saskatchewan legislature, a royal commission was established to inquire into “the alleged ‘improvident and profligate’ Morang school book contract and the reasons why it was granted.” This study makes evident how controversial textbook provision has been and examines the political influences and commercial pressures that fuelled one such controversy.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".