Education and Political Development

Abstract

Eleven years ago, Easton (1957, p. 305) observed that regarding educational institutions has receded to a distinctly peripheral position in the discipline [of political science] as a whole. Although it is arguable whether political scientists, with a few notable exceptions, had ever regarded education as more than peripheral with regard to their discipline, Easton's statement was certainly correct at the time it was made. Today, educational systems and processes have assumed a significant place in political science research. American political science has become aware, so to speak, of the educational dimension of politics. At the same time, little evidence can be found to indicate that the educational profession, in a corresponding manner, has become as aware of the political dimensions of education. To be sure, a number of exceptions have to be acknowledged -most notably the work by Hess (Hess and Easton, 1960; Hess and Torney, 1967) on political attitudes of elementary school children-but by and large what modest insight we have at the present into the relationship between education and politics is overwhelmingly the result of theory building and research by political scientists, particularly in regard to the more specific developmental and comparative perspective implied by the notion of political development as one of the proposed correlates of education. On the whole, comparative education as a field of specialized research in professional education has failed to transcend its principal concern with what Coleman (1965), in using one of C. A. Anderson's terms, has called intra-educational analysis. At the present time, it remains to be seen whether new programs in international development education, promising as they appear to be in this respect, will indeed bridge the difference that separates professional educators from social scientists in their respective concerns with the economic, sociocultural, and political implications of education.