Civic Values Learned in School: Policy and Practice in Industrialized Nations

Abstract

International trade in educational ideas has been important since the Middle Ages and, to a lesser extent, before. Sometimes imports have flourished, whereas in other cases they have failed. In still other instances, foreign and national practices have come to coexist. Foreign influences have been especially important in shaping broad educational goals and new institutional structures. This exchange continues: once again, in the 1980s, reports of high student achievement in other nations have fueled proposals for educational reform in the United States. There has, however, been little comparative concern with values in education.' One reason for this lack of explicit concern for how values are taught and learned in other countries may be the long-standing tendency of U.S. Americans to view their educational system's impact on civic or moral values as responsive to unique historic and cultural circumstances and to claim superiority for U.S. methods of civic and moral education. In 1899, for example, the Committee of Seven of the American Historical Association conducted a study of education in Europe. Although they identified some promising practices, they concluded that German and French schools regard pupils as subjects rather than citizens, while English instruction was chaotic and entirely lacking in attention to civil government.2 One can find opinions not too different in recent writing. By the late 1800s, two trends in the United States had, in fact, made American schools different from those in Europe. The first was the rapid growth of the free public high school operated under local control, financed by taxation, and open to students of a wide range of backgrounds. This institution was notably different from the more centralized (often religious)