It is about 50 years since political socialization studies began. I was a research assistant at the University of Chicago for the study that resulted in two books (The Developmental of Political Attitudes in Children by Hess & Torney, and Children in the Political System, by Easton & Dennis). Both were based on surveys of 13,000 2nd -8th graders from 8 US cities. The sub-field of “political socialization research” was growing. A meeting was held in 1967 at the University of Michigan (“Political Socialization in Modern Mass Societies”) primarily with political scientists such as Jennings, Greenstein and Sigel. At that time almost all political activity was channeled through political parties. “Civic education” and schools were not discussed, largely because of the need to avoid perceptions of partisanship in public education.
In 1967 I was invited to help plan the six subject surveys for IEA (Civic Education in Ten Countries: An Empirical Study,1975). It is still the only subject area in IEA’s International Large Scale Assessments that includes as many attitudinal as knowledge questions. In the early 1990s the fall of Communism stimulated concern about how young people acquire democratic political behavior; many placed their faith in schools. The IEA CIVED project, on young people’s civic knowledge and engagement in 28 countries began in 1993, tested in 1999 and published in 2001; post-Communist scholars were prominent (also Western Europeans worried about declines in youth political participation). The International Civics and Citizenship Study took place in 2009.
The presentation will deal with these trends in the field and the context of schools, with a particular focus on research about the role of classroom discussions. Although many political scientists are interested in “deliberative democracy,” they generally see this as something in which only adults can participate. This presentation challenges that notion
