essay review of Theobald's Education Now. Education Review, 12(6).
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Paul Theobald is an American intellectual historian who believes that ideas have mattered historically and that they continue to matter today. Like Canadian philosopher Kieran Egan whose book Getting it Wrong from the Beginning (2002) challenges foundational education theory, Theobald argues in his new book Education Now: How Rethinking America’s Past Can Change its Future that educational thought led us astray a long time ago forming the inadequate and deficient taken-for-granted certainties that underpin our ways of thinking about education. Theobald believes that 17th century political philosophy―an even older source of ideas than the late 19th and early 20th century thinkers Egan addresses―has formed a seldom examined conceptual foundation for a range of current educational, economic, political, and social problems. Theobald contends that had different philosophical choices been made at the birth of the United States, the country, its core institutions, its political economy, and even its geography might have developed very differently. He describes a process that begins with an overly hasty and even consciously illegal manoeuvring in the framing of the United States ConstitutionEducation Review Vol. 12 No. 6 2 and devolves into the atomistic consumerist individualism that now marks the American social experiment; he wonders how it might be unmade with different ideas. Theobald’s style is scholarly but highly accessible. He presents complex philosophical debates and ideational trajectories with remarkable clarity. And he offers a range of concrete suggestions for getting things back on track with the help of alternative theoretical principles. Theobald looks at periods of political instability like the Glorious Revolution in
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.013 |
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".