More Than Sunday's Lessons: Sunday School Education in Upper Canada, 1811-1850
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Attending Sunday school was an experience shared by most Protestant settler children in Upper Canada. The Sunday school was a local and community institution and its curriculum, pedagogy, and structure varied as each school's purpose was determined by local needs. The motivations behind Sunday schooling varied and its purpose was never exclusively religious instruction. As a central tenant of Protestantism, literacy education, particularly reading and spelling, was central to Sunday school curriculum in this period. Likewise, virtues of Victorian Protestant behavior such as obedience, self-discipline, purity, and charity were reinforced in Sunday school classrooms and their supporting communities. Broader lessons in socialization and citizenship, particularly British imperial discourses, were prevalent in Sunday school literature as well as infused in both classroom and extracurricular activities. Unlike other institutions of the time, Sunday schools were never imposed on Upper Canadian settlers. Sunday schools emerged as a space created and defined for lay settlers themselves and their involvement was entirely voluntary. Sunday schools remained at a significant distance from both official church and state structures in this period, allowing Upper Canadians to actively participate at all stages in the development of this mass system of popular schooling. Though a central organization aided Sunday schools across the province, every school had its own local autonomy. This study documents and analyses how Upper Canadian settlers met their own self-defined educational needs through Sunday schools, both before and beyond mass state-run schooling in the province. It argues that the Sunday school was one avenue through which lay settlers in Upper Canada put the increasingly prevalent ideas of universal popular schooling for children into practice beyond the purview of both the state and the church
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".