The Making of the 'Problem Child': Egerton Ryerson and the Liberal Project of Ontario Public Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What makes a problem child? In this thesis, I search for the conditions of possibility for the ‘problem child’, or a student who is constructed as someone who does not belong to the classroom. I focus on the works of Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent at the genesis of Ontario public schooling, who proposed supposedly universal ‘common’ schools as well as residential schools, segregated schooling by race, and institutionalized schooling for disabled students and lower-class students. Rather than creating contradictions, Ryerson’s plans for common schools and separate schools are manifestations of his liberal philosophy, which supported a vision of public schooling that would produce a future civilized state. This conceptualization relies on the production of categories of uncivilized difference, which education can then manage and control. The figure of the ‘problem child’ shows that the very philosophy that promises universal education is dependent on the exclusion of many from that promise.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".