The Schooled Society Index: Measuring the increased centrality of education and its societal consequences from a global perspective

Research description

This project studies the growth of ‘schooled societies’, a quiet revolution whereby education has gradually become a primary and authoritative institution in society. I empirically explore and map cross-national variation regarding the multiple dimensions of 'schooled societies' and its direct and indirect effects on citizen’s thinking, feeling and behaving. I aim to answer three interrelated research questions. First, how do countries vary regarding the different dimensions of the development of the schooled society and how do these dimensions relate to each other? To that end, I will construct the Schooled Society Index, an indicator or empirical typology that reflects variation in the level of development of a schooled society. Second, to what extent does this country-level indicator/typology predict relevant individual-level outcomes? Third, how does the growth of schooled societies affect different subgroups (e.g., gender and religious-based groups)? To answer these questions, I will develop a global comparative and publicly available dataset relying on country-level data from international databanks and content analyses, and conduct indicator or typology-construction analyses based on this dataset. I will link these data with survey data from the World Values Survey and European Values Study and assess the effects of the growth of schooled societies on religiosity, political participation and feelings of social malaise/anomie.