Education and Social Security Entitlements in Europe and America

Abstract

This chapter deals with the development of social security and education policies in Western Europe and North America, are interrelated and subjected to intensive scrutiny. Germany used its expanded social security system to deflect upward mobility ambitions, and imposed a system of tight coupling between its educational, labor market and social security systems. In Germany the decade that marked the introduction of social security legislation saw education policy makers greatly enhancing their bureaucratic steering potential over the school system. The initiation of national social security legislation in Germany in the 1880s and in the United States in the 1930s laid the basis for the growth of one bundle of more uniform citizens' entitlements. The American social security programs do not contain the equivalent of the German occupational invalidity program, and their social adjudication has not hinged so strongly as the German one on the principle of Zumutbarkeit.