Schools, Socialisation and European Citizenship

Abstract

Chapter 6 described some of the different dimensions of young people’s attitudes towards European citizenship, and suggested that youth attitudes often vary across countries. This pattern was not unexpected, not least because Chapter 5 indicated that there is considerable variation in how member states teach about Europe, and that the European dimension to citizenship education policies tends to be shaped by the distinctive socio-political contexts of individual member states. However, this argument rests on several assumptions about the impact of education policy and schooling more broadly on individual students. This chapter therefore seeks to test these assumptions further by using cross-national survey data to examine the relationship between schooling and individual attitudes. In other words, the central aim of this chapter is to tackle the question: (How) do education policies and schooling practices in member states influence young people’s attitudes towards European citizenship? In addressing this question, the chapter will focus in particular on three key areas through which previous literature has suggested that education and schooling might influence young people’s attitudes towards European citizenship: first, through the level of opportunities provided by schools for young people to learn about Europe; second, through the type of citizenship messages encoded in state education policies; and finally, through features of the school culture, and in particular, peer attitudes among classmates towards European integration, immigrants and the nation-state itself.KeywordsEuropean IntegrationEducation PolicyNational IdentityOutcome IndicatorNational CurriculumThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.