The 19th-century emergence of a centralized, state-controlled school system helped stabilize government and legitimize a state model during a revolutionary period in French history. The centralized model assisted national integration goals by fabricating a symbolic public space. This ambitious political construction may be coming apart. (Contains…

The theoretical framework proposed here treats political alienation as a normal outcome of the incompatability between egalitarian goals and social inequalities in democratic systems. The framework is applied to the role of education in the United States, a stable democracy, and in West Germany, an emergent democracy. (Author/SJL)

This social studies curriculum guide for grades 5 and 6 is a product of the American Values Exemplary Center directed by Ralph H. Davis. The introduction describes a model program to introduce students to the functioning of local and national government through a student government program set up as an essential part of the social studies…

Distinctions between political socialization as beliefs about ideals, beliefs about the realities of governmental structure, as attempts at cognitive consistency, and as affective orientations toward the system, map out most children's political orientations. The objects of these orientations are: 1) America as a nation and patriotic attachment;…

The contraditions within the systems of school support and school policy-making make it difficult to find a manner of governance of the social studies program which is protected from extraneous influence and yet avoids creating a buffer between the schools and the democratic forces to which they are responsive. State and federal governments…

Given the general recognition that what we do is influenced as much or more by our value commitments as by our factual knowledge, it is ironic that social studies, the area of the curriculum supposedly focused on citizenship education, has paid so little attention to values. There are many reasons for this, but one of them, the author believes, is…

This bulletin of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) sets forth the philosophic grounds for democratizing schools and the evidence from research as to why this task should be undertaken. In the first part of the booklet, a brief NCSS position statement indicates that schools should practice democracy and be able to instruct through…