Civic values and the subject matter of educational courses

Abstract

It is widely agreed that formal learning can influence people’s social attitudes and can encourage them to take part in civic activities. Less investigated, however, has been the question of whether these effects flow from any kind of education, or whether particular subjects of study are more relevant to civic values than others. The 1958 and 1970 British birth cohort studies are used to investigate this question. Longitudinal data are essential here in three respects. They allow the accumulation of information about many episodes of learning, and so allow attention to be given to learning in adulthood, vocational courses, and informal learning as well as to courses that are part of formal initial education. They allow numerous confounding factors to be controlled for. And, with such controls, they allow the question of whether there might be long‐term influences of learning. The conclusion is that courses in the social sciences and humanities are more strongly associated with socially liberal values and with participation than other courses, but that (by comparing cohorts) this distinction might be declining over time.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Peter Shepherd and Samantha Parsons of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies for providing information about the coding of courses of study in the data collected in the year 2000, to Cristina Iannelli for comments on an earlier draft and on the coding of the occupational class variables, and to Tom Schuller, Jon Lauglo and Paul Croll for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. Illustrations of the questionnaire items to which strength of agreement was sought are: on left‐right, ‘government should redistribute income’; on racism scale, ‘it is alright for people from different races to get married’; on civil liberties, ‘censorship is needed to uphold moral standard’; on the family, ‘it is alright for people to have children without being married’; on political engagement, it makes ‘not much difference which political party is in power’; on the environment, ‘problems in the environment are not as serious as people claim’. Full details are in the survey documentation (available from www.esds.ac.uk).

2. A specialised version of this potential bias would be that people who are more inclined to participate in the surveys themselves would be more likely to take social science or arts courses.

3. I am grateful to Paul Croll for suggesting this further test.