Political culture and education in advanced industrial societies: West Germany and the United States

This paper sets out a theoretical framework for the understanding of education and political culture in industrial societies. The framework represents a response to the systems approach to this subject. The framework we propose treats political alienation as a normal outcome of the incompatibility between egalitarian goals and social inequalities in democratic systems. The framework is then applied to the role of education in the United States. We view education as a means by which norms later productive of political alienation are initially distributed throughout democratic systems. Further, we view the school's current predicament in America as a manifestation of its role in the creation of alienation. We then turn to Germany and speculate about the sources of recent democratic support in that political culture, despite the alienating tendencies predicted by our model. We single out factors of tradition, religion, economics, and educational organization as means of understanding changes in the political culture of that society. An absence of relevant data prevents us from applying our model of alienation in a fully comparative way to the German situation. We conclude by considering the effects of short-run political events on our model, and by speculating about the resurgence of alienation in German political culture once German schools, like American schools, more fully play the role of disseminating egalitarian norms in a socially inegalitarian system.

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Zusammenfassung Diese Studie stellt einen Rahmen für das Verständnis des Bildungswesens und der politischen Kultur in Industrieländern auf, der als Antwort auf den Systems-Ansatz zu diesem Thema gedacht ist. Dieser Rahmen behandelt politische Entfremdung als normales Ergebnis der Unvereinbarkeit von egalitären Zielen und sozialen Ungleichheiten in demokratischen Systemen. Zunächst wird er auf die Rolle des Bildungswesens in den USA angewandt. Bildung wird als ein Mittel gesehen, dem gesamten demokratischen System Normen zu eigen zu machen, die später zu politischer Entfremdung führen. Auch die gegenwärtigen Schwierigkeiten im amerikanischen Schulwesen werden auf seine Rolle als Erzeuger von Entfremdung zurückgeführt. Dann geht die Untersuchung auf die Bundesrepublik Deutschland über und stellt Überlegungen an über die Ursachen der deutlichen Zunahme demokratischer Gesinnung, trotz der von dem hier vorgeschlagenen Modell vorausgesetzten Entfremdungstendenzen. Tradition, religiöse und wirtschaftliche Faktoren sowie die Organisation des deutschen Bildungswesens werden zur Erklärung der Veränderungen in der politischen Kultur dieser Gesellschaft herangezogen. Mangels relevanter Daten kann das Entfremdungsmodell nicht in völlig vergleichbarer Weise auf die deutsche Situation angewandt werden. Abschliessend werden die Auswirkungen kurzfristiger politischer Ereignisse auf das Modell in Betracht gezogen sowie die Möglichkeit, dass auch in der deutschen politischen Kultur wieder stärkere Entfremdung eintreten wird, sobald die deutschen Schulen, ähnlich den amerikanischen, in vollerem Umfang die Rolle der Verbreitung egalitärer Normen in einem sozial nicht-egalitären Gesellschaftssystem spielen.

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Résumé Cet article présente und cadre théorique de travail permettant une meilleure compréhension de l'éducation et de la culture politique dans les sociétés industrielles. Ce cadre est une réponse à l'approche systématique de ce sujet. Le cadre que nous proposons envisage l'aliénation politique comme un aboutissement normal de l'incompatibilité entre buts égalitaires et inégalités sociales dans des systèmes démocratiques. Le cadre est ensuite appliqué au rôle de l'éducation aux Etats Unis. Nous regardons l'éducation comme un moyen par lequel les normes qui, ultérieurement vont produire l'aliénation politique, sont distribuées initialement, dans les systèmes démocratiques. Nous examinons ensuite l'école: nous voyons sa situation critique actuelle en Amérique comme une manifestation de son rôle dans la création de l'aliénation. Nous nous tournons ensuite vers l'Allemagne et nous formons des conjectures sur les sources du récent soutien démocratique à cette culture politique, en dépit des tendances à l'aliénation prédites par notre modèle. Nous choisissons des facteurs de tradition, de religion, d'économie et d'organisation éducative comme étant des moyens permettant de comprendre les changements dans la culture politique de cette société. Une absence de données pertinentes relatives à ce sujet nous empêche d'appliquer notre modèle d'aliénation d'une façon parfaitement comparative à la situation en Allemagne. Nous concluons en examinant les effets des évènements politiques pendant une brève période sur notre modèle et en faisant quelques réflexions sur la résurgence de l'aliénation dans la culture politique allemande, lorsque les écoles allemandes, comme les écoles américaines, jouent plus complètement le rôle de disséminatrices de normes égalitaires dans un système socialement inégalitaire.

     

Open-Skilled Sport,Sport Intensity,Executive Function,and Academic Achievement in Grade School Children

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: The present study examines connections among participation in open- and closed-skilled sports; the metabolic intensity of each sport; and executive function (EF), literacy, and math achievement in a sample of 3rd-grade children. Utilizing data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, we categorized 15 youth sports (e.g., soccer, tennis, swimming, running track) as open or closed skilled and assigned them a metabolic intensity value. Results showed that the connection between sport intensity and EF was curvilinear, with a positive association between EF and sport intensity below 25 metabolic equivalents (METs) and a negative association with METs above 25. For math, results differed for the number of open-skilled sports and the intensity of a sport, with higher intensity associated with lower math scores and playing more open-skilled sports associated with higher math scores. Literacy skills were not significantly related to sport participation. Practice or Policy: The preschool years may offer a promising opportunity to encourage participation in both complex and intense physical activity. These findings highlight domain-specific connections among sports and EF and math achievement and offer insight into connections among sport intensity (METs), the type of sports children play, and cognitive development.     

A Guide to Just and Fair Remediation of Counseling Students with Professional Performance Deficiencies

Ethical standards for counselor training require remediation of students with professional performance deficiencies. However, standards fail to specify the type or extent of remediation necessary to safeguard students' legal rights or justify dismissal if remediation is unsuccessful. Critical assessment of remedial practices in counselor preparation has occurred primarily in the courts when the constitutionality of specific practices was challenged. Prompted by a recent court challenge and its implications for curricular and policy change (C. R. McAdams, V. A. Foster, & T. J. Ward, 2007), this article examines court‐tested methods of student remediation and presents them as a guide for developing just and fair student remediation policies.     

Māori university graduates: indigenous participation in higher education

Māori, the indigenous population of New Zealand, are gaining university qualifications in greater numbers. This article describes the history of Māori university graduates, their current situation and the implications for indigenous futures. Section one provides a brief overview of historical policies and practices that, similar to those used on other indigenous populations, resulted in the widespread exclusion of Māori from university education until the 1970s and 1980s. Section two describes findings for Māori university graduates (n?=?626) from the Graduate Longitudinal Study New Zealand (GLSNZ). Results show that nearly half (48.4%) were the first member of their immediate family to attend university. Humanities/education (50.8%) was the most common domain of study followed by commerce (17.7%), science/engineering (15.4%), health sciences (10.9%), law (2.8%) and PhD study (2.4%). More Māori graduates were females (71%). One-third of graduates were parents, and being a parent was associated with a lower likelihood of studying science and engineering compared to those participants without children. The most common areas/fields that participants wished to work in post-graduation were education and training (28.3%), health care and medical (17.4%) and government (11.8%). Despite increases in higher education participation and completion, parity remains an issue. Similar to previous indigenous research findings, Māori are under-represented as graduates (7.1% of the total sample) and in particular as postgraduates (5.8%) considering that Māori constitute 14.9% of the New Zealand population. Contemporary indigenous graduates are critical for indigenous development. Over the next 10 years, the GLSNZ will follow graduates and provide insights into Māori graduate outcomes.     

Conditions for young infants' perception of object trajectories

When an object moves behind an occluder and re-emerges, 4-month-old infants perceive trajectory continuity only when the occluder is narrow, raising the question of whether time or distance out of sight is the important constraining variable. One hundred and forty 4-month-olds were tested in five experiments aimed to disambiguate time and distance out of sight. Manipulating the object's visible speed had no effect on infants' responses, but reducing occlusion time by increasing object speed while occluded induced perception of trajectory continuity. In contrast, slowing the ball while it was behind a narrow or intermediate screen did not modify performance. It is concluded that 4-month-olds perceive trajectory continuity when time or distance out of sight is short.     

Lazy multiculturalism: cultural essentialism and the persistence of the Multicultural Day in Australian schools

ABSTRACT

Multicultural Days are a regular event in Australian schools. While they are viewed as a vehicle for cultural inclusion and strengthening community, they have long been critiqued for their avoidance of a more critical engagement with deeper issues around cultural complexity. The intent of this paper is not simply to add to this critique but to understand why such forms of lazy multiculturalism persist in schools. Taking an ethnographic orientation to the field of multicultural education, it examines one school's approach to the Multicultural Day. The paper considers how, despite engaging in professional learning designed to challenge established practice in this area, teachers resisted the intellectual task of doing diversity differently. The ethnographic methods used in the study not only allowed for an examination of the practices this school engaged in, they drew attention to how teachers might modify their practice and develop a deeper understanding of cultural complexity.     

Education,economy, and equality

This commentary undertakes a restricted analysis of the Reimer paper by focusing upon possible relations between education and the economy and the problem of equality of opportunity in the developing areas. It suggests that his interpretation of current trends is hardly adequate. Existing data would indicate that formal schooling can make a substantial contribution to development and the economic benefits that accrue to it are not monopolized by elites. Moreover, although education contributes to the maintenance of existing systems of stratification, it also frequently facilitates a good deal of mobility; Reimer's prediction of increasing class differentiation and status crystallization is by no means evident on the basis of existing materials. Finally, the assumptions underlying Reimer's conception of social change are essentially utopian in nature and the author has not really examined the strategic and tactical implications of his rhetoric.

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Résumé Cette critique fait une analyse limitée de l'article de Reimer en se restreignant aux relations possibles entre l'éducation et l'économie et au problème de la répartition égale des chances dans les endroits en voie de développement. On suggère que son interprétation des tendances courantes n'est point adéquate. Les données actuelles indiquent que l'éducation formelle peut contribuer considérablement au développement, et les bénéfices économiques qui lui reviennent ne sont pas le monopole des élites. En plus, bien que léducation contribue au prolongement des systèmes existants de stratification, elle facilite souvent la mobilité; la prédiction de Reimer d'une différentiation croissante de classe et d'une crystallisation de position sociale n'est pas basée sur les matériaux existants. Enfin, les suppositions qui forment la base de la conception de Reimer concernant le changement social sont essentiellement utopiques. Reimer n'a pas vraiment examiné les implications stratégiques et tactiques de sa rhétorique.