description
The effects of education on liberal values are shown to be not universal, but rather, to vary systematically across time and place. These effects were interpreted as a form of socialization - not as psychodynamic or class effects - and they were investigated in a comparative-historical perspecitve, using attitudes on anti-Semitism as the dependent variable. Selznick and Steinberg's hypothesis that education's liberalizing effects represent the influence of the "official," Enlightenment culture in the United States was expanded and applied cross-nationally in the United States, West Germany, Austria, and France. This effect varied according to two determinants of Enlightenment culture: the length of time a country had had a liberal democratic regime form, and the degree either of "traditionalism" or of religious pluralism in the country. However, temporal change in education's effects in the United States (i.e., in a constant Enlightenment culture) was interpreted differently, by making distinctions among other agents of socialization and between anti-Semitism as prejudice and as intergroup conflict.