Review of Educational Pluralism and Democracy: How to Handle Indoctrination, Promote Exposure, and Rebuild America’s Schools, by Ashley Rogers Berner
Bibliographic record
Abstract
E Pluribus Unum-from many one-is our Latin motto, but in this challenging book, Ashley Rogers Berner claims that we've never really honored the pluribus part. 1 The several states that established public schools were originally Protestant but are now secular.This forced dissenting parents to either pay a financial premium for sending their children to schools consistent with their distinctive vision of the good life, or to send their children to a "public" school that would inculcate values and attitudes they deplore.It should not and would not have to be like that, she writes, as educational systems in many countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands demonstrate.According to Berner, the government ought to fund all schools and even homeschoolers, so long as they adhere to the Unites States Constitution.The Constitution, Berner believes, would set boundaries, forbidding discrimination in hiring or admissions on the basis of race, to take one example. 2 This may sound attractive to some, but dangerous to others.Doesn't it ignore the unum part of the motto?Would her proposed restructuring not lead to indoctrinating students, thereby intensifying already alarming polarization?No, argues Berner, because she identifies an "unum," a common liberal arts curriculum that ought to be taught in all schools.These schools would not be guilty of the charge of indoctrinating their students, she claims, because they would expose students to alternative viewpoints on controversial 1 At least not since prior to the establishment of public school systems in the mid-19th century.2 Chapter five provides a lucid and fair-minded review of Supreme Court decisions that indicate the boundaries of what parents or schools may do.Berner acknowledges that some of these boundaries are clear, others fuzzy.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".