“The Absolute Indifference of the\nMajority”: The Western Canadian\nAssociation of the Deaf and\nthe Establishment of Deaf Education\nin Saskatchewan, 1923–1931
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the role of the Western Canadian Association of the Deaf (wcad) in the establishment of the Saskatchewan School for the Deaf (ssd) from 1923–1931. Using correspondence between provincial officials, wcad figures, parents of deaf children, as well as extensive application records and contemporary deaf publications, it contributes to a growing body of historical literature that seeks to reappraise the political advocacy and agency of deaf and disabled people in Canada before the late twentieth century. This article argues that the wcad was instrumental in both forcing the government of Saskatchewan to meaningfully extend compulsory education to deaf children and youth, and in advising the governments of James Gardiner and J.T.M. Anderson on how best to establish an ssd that met many of the Association's key cultural, linguistic, and educational demands. Résumé: Le présent article étudie le rôle de la Western Canadian Association of the Deaf (wcad) dans la création de la Saskatchewan School for the Deaf (ssd) de 1923 à 1931. S'appuyant sur la correspondance entre les fonctionnaires provinciaux et les parents d'enfants sourds, les chiffres de la wcad ainsi que les nombreuses demandes d'inscription et publications de l'époque sur les sourds, il enrichit un corpus historiographique en pleine expansion qui cherche à réévaluer la défense politique et l'agentivité des personnes sourdes et handicapées au Canada avant la fin du XXe siècle. Cet article soutient que la wcad a contribué à forcer le gouvernement de la Saskatchewan à étendre de manière importante l'enseignement aux enfants et aux jeunes sourds, et à conseiller les gouvernements de James Gardiner et de J. T. M. Anderson sur la meilleure façon de créer une ssd tenant compte des principales demandes de l'Association sur les plans culturel, linguistique et éducatif.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".