Book Review: A Class by Themselves? (2019) The Origins of Special Education in Toronto and Beyond, by Jason Ellis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this excellent analysis of special education in Toronto, Canada, from 1910 to 1945, Ellis concluded that no single straightforward story or overarching theory explains everything about this subject, which has always been the source of much debate.Policy makers, educators, and parents never had one cohesive goal, nor was there a consistent approach to special education, or what was originally called auxiliary education.Ellis asserts that neither "unimpeachable altruism" nor "malevolent and naked social control" (p.203) characterized initial developments and that early influences still reverberate today.The foundations of the auxiliary education movement were laid at the beginning of the 20th century as part of a large "wave" (p.11) of social reforms in the 1910s.The Toronto Board of Education established its first auxiliary classes in the 1910-1911 school year.Ontario's most ardent proponent of segregated arrangements for the "feebleminded" was eugenicist Helen MacMurchy (Ellis elects not to sanitize the text of labels used commonly in the past-"mental defective," "cripple," and "moron"-even though they may be unsettling to readers).MacMurchy "believed that if an entire generation of feebleminds was permanently segregated, 'there would be such a drop in their numbers that soon we should be practically rid of this terrible problem'" (as cited on p. 19).The recommendations of reformers and eugenicists prepared students "not for social integration and independence but for exclusion and dependency" (p.51).The trajectory of auxiliary education changed in the 1920s, primarily because of the adoption of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) testing and increasing faith in testers' ability to determine children's needs.The majority of experts gave up their nuanced appreciation of the many factors that had an impact on a child's ability to succeed at school in favour of a simplistic reductionism.They believed that decisions about students' innate, unalterable intellectual capacity could be determined by IQ scores.With individual potential circumscribed ostensibly by one's IQ test result, policy makers phased out remedial classes for the "backward" and replaced them with practical training that would prepare students to take their preordained position "in a workforce supposedly defined by a hierarchy of intelligence" (p.84).By the late 1920s, many auxiliary class students were funneled into the newly created junior vocational schools for 13-to 16-year-olds.So-called "dull-normal" students, who were categorized as not well suited for the more rigorously academic technical schools, commercial schools, and collegiate institutes, also attended.The Ontario government had enacted legislation to combat truancy and keep students in school until age 16, and there were fewer jobs for adolescents in a
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.077 | 0.039 |
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".