Public Schooling and the Spirit of Secularism: The Secular Dynamics of Education Reform in Canada’s 1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the question “what is secular education?” Scholarship and public discourse typically treat secular education as a synonym for either state-run schooling or any educational process that is not explicit formation in a religious tradition. Such views rely on a static conception of the secular as the simple opposite or absence of religion, the neutral substrate of political and social reality that remains once religion has been removed. I argue in this dissertation that the secular is a substantive, dynamic presence in modern mass schooling, whose operations are active and formational. The secular is, crucially, pedagogical — it cultivates certain kinds of subjects and societies. Public education thus represents an underappreciated site of secular activity, demonstrating its formational dynamics with unusual clarity. This dissertation examines these features of secular education through a comparative analysis of Ontario’s “Hall-Dennis Committee” and Quebec’s “Parent Commission,” two influential education reform bodies from Canada’s 1960s, a pivotal decade for the acceleration and entrenchment of Canadian secularism. Drawing on extensive research in the provincial archives of these two commissions, I examine their deliberations, documentation, and reporting through an anthropological lens. I argue that secular education relies on the interactions between distinctly modern conceptions of the students and the structures of public schooling. I describe the dynamics of childhood in the commissions’ vision of secular schooling through the concepts of “the enchanted child” and “the enlightened adult,” which represent influential variations on the meaning of maturation at the individual and societal level in a secular age. I also examine a 20th century view of bureaucratic structures that runs throughout the activities of the commissions, portraying structures as rationalizing, self-standing, relational, and disenchanting. Secular education, I argue, is animated by the tensions that emerge when different configurations of the enchanted child, the enlightened adult, and the structures of modern mass schooling interact within specific cultural and socio-spiritual environments. These constitutive ambivalences have exercised a significant influence on educational development in Canada and beyond, generating durable modes of pedagogy, policymaking, educational administration, and curriculum.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".