Education and its roles and functions in a modern society
Three main perspectives will be applied:
a) Educational achievement process in a cross-national comparative perspective. Discussions will focus on how and to what degree the different characteristics of societies, their economies and their educational systems influence the average educational achievements of students in those societies, as well as the size the sources of variation in these achievements. The dependent variable in this perspective is the educational achievement of students, while independent variables are the macro variables of the societies. The data from a number of countries and with more than just one measurement are now available to make simultaneous multi-level analyses using data at various levels (macro, meso, micro).
b) The role of personality, family and school in generating inequality in educational outcomes in a cross-national perspective. This perspective will lead our discussions to the question how and to what degree the characteristics of schools and the education system intensify and/or attenuate the differences in educational outcomes of various groups of students. The dependent variable in this perspective will be the variance in educational achievement among students, and the independent variables will be the school and parental characteristics, while the macro variables of the societies will serve as possible explanations for the variance between school and parental characteristics. Within this perspective we also plan to discuss the role of testing in education, both in terms of its effects on a quality of educational outcomes, as well as its consequences for inequality in educational attainment.
c) The role of education in social stratification and mobility in a cross-national perspective. The role of education in the process of social stratification and mobility has been for decades one of the central questions of social stratification research. Though consensus has been achieved that education is the strongest mediator between origins and destinations, conflicting explanations still exist as for the main factors explaining cross-national differences in educational attainment and in the effect of education on occupation and income (different labor market outcomes of education). In order to solve for the existing controversies, the research on the role of education in social stratification (both as dependent and independent variable) is shifting emphasis from sophisticated descriptive analyses of cross-national differences to their explanations. The veracity of such explanations will to the great extent depend on the availability of data from longitudinal projects and on one’s capacity to make use of them. Therefore, we will discuss relevant theories and methods applied in modern research of social stratification, present well known examples of longitudinal projects and analyses addressing mechanisms generating inequality in access to higher education and capacity of education to generate higher economic outcomes. We will try to initiate a network to support an expansion of longitudinal projects in Europe.
trends in class and status mobility, process of social stratification and intergenerational reproduction of ineguality, poverty and social exclusion, social networks and social capital, labour markets, role of family, etc. are welcome, especially cross-national comparartive studies, in a cross-national comparative perspective.
Those interested in the topic of the ECSR Summer School are also invited the website of the European Forum, academic year 2006-2007: Assessing the Quality of Education and Its Relationships with Inequality in European and Other Modern Societies.
