Some scholars argue that education systems across the western world are becoming increasingly similar due to the influence of transnational discourses and organizations. Others believe that education is the panacea for all problems of social cohesion. After all, aren't the well-educated usually more tolerant, civically engaged and trusting than the poorly educated? This book critically examines both claims. It finds that western countries still differ markedly on key aspects of their education systems and that these differences reflect distinct political traditions and different responses to a set of competing normative and political principles. The findings further suggest that raising the average education level is unlikely to be an effective strategy for promoting social cohesion. Instead, more promising are policies targeting the opposite ends of the lifelong learning continuum: universalizing pre-school education and care and promoting adult education with a pronounced second chance character.

The first fully comparative empirical analysis of the relationship between education and social cohesion, this book develops a new "distributional theory" of the effects of educational inequality on social solidarity. Based on a wide-ranging theoretical critique, and extensive analysis of data on inequality and social attitudes for over 25 developed countries, the study shows how educational inequality undermines social trust, civic co-operation and the rule of law. It is not how much education a country has that matters for social cohesion but how it is distributed and the co-operative values that people learn.

In an original, and highly interdisciplinary, mixed method approach, Green and Janmaat identify four major traditions of social cohesion in developed societies, analyzing how these various mechanisms are withstanding the strains of the current global financial crisis.

Some scholars argue that education systems across the western world are becoming increasingly similar due to the influence of transnational discourses and organizations. Others believe that education is the panacea for all problems of social cohesion. After all, aren't the well-educated usually more tolerant, civically engaged and trusting than the poorly educated? This book critically examines both claims. It finds that western countries still differ markedly on key aspects of their education systems and that these differences reflect distinct political traditions and different responses to a set of competing normative and political principles. The findings further suggest that raising the average education level is unlikely to be an effective strategy for promoting social cohesion. Instead, more promising are policies targeting the opposite ends of the lifelong learning continuum: universalizing pre-school education and care and promoting adult education with a pronounced second chance character.

Building on Green and Janmaat's previous work on education, equality and social cohesion, this book, now in paperback, analyses the various mechanisms that hold different societies together and how these are withstanding the strains of the current economic crisis. In an original, and highly interdisciplinary, mixed method approach, drawing on evidence from historical sociology, political science and political economy, Green and Janmaat identify four major traditions of social cohesion in developed western and east Asian societies, each with specific institutional and cultural foundations. An extensive statistical analysis of contemporary administrative and attitudinal data for over 30 countries demonstrates that there are still distinctive 'regimes of social cohesion' in 'liberal, ' 'social market' and 'social democratic' countries and that they achieve social bonding in quite different ways. As the crisis of globalization unfolds in the wake of the global financial crisis, social cohesion in each regime is vulnerable at different points.

In an original, and highly interdisciplinary, mixed method approach, Green and Janmaat identify four major traditions of social cohesion in developed societies, analyzing how these various mechanisms are withstanding the strains of the current global financial crisis.

The first fully comparative empirical analysis of the relationship between education and social cohesion, this book develops a new "distributional theory" of the effects of educational inequality on social solidarity. Based on extensive analysis of data on inequality and social attitudes for over 25 developed countries.