Topic > The interconnection between education and politics

Education is an inevitable part of everyone's life. It is an important means of acquiring essential knowledge and skills. Education and politics play a crucial role in every field of life. Likewise, both make the world better and are important for better standards of living and citizenship. However, education and politics share a very close and strong bond. As in democracy, education is a kind of prerequisite for the success of the politician. Government officials offer a vision of the kind of society they need, and education has been the primary method for making it happen. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay While it is obvious that education and politics are related, there is no doubt that education is strongly correlated with political attitudes and behavior in Western societies. Highly educated actors participate more intensely in politics, have higher levels of political interest and knowledge, and are more tolerant and trusting. All available evidence therefore suggests that education is, or has become, the main gateway to political involvement. However, there is considerable disagreement about exactly how this door works. While some authors argue that education has a direct impact on value patterns and skills, others argue that the importance placed on educational experiences is overstated. Cindy Kam and Carl Palmer, for example, argue that education should be regarded as a mere proxy variable. They argue that specific sets of contextual variables, such as parental and individual characteristics, not only lead to more intense political involvement but also enable access to higher education. Privileged groups or children of privileged parents are more likely to achieve higher levels of education, but according to these authors it would be wrong to attribute any causal effect to these educational experiences. In this approach, education is little more than an indication of already existing patterns of social stratification and inequality. So far, this debate over the exact nature of educational effects has not led to any final conclusions, partly due to a lack of data. The question of whether college education experiences have an additional effect, beyond the stratification already present upon entry into higher education, requires panel data that are scarce in political science. In fact, the entire debate that followed the publication of Kam and Palmer's (2008) article is based almost exclusively on the analysis of panel data that is now a few decades old. Since that time, patterns of access to higher education have changed dramatically. Furthermore, so far the study of the effects of higher education has focused on political participation as the dependent variable, while we can assume that college and university campuses often serve as recruiting grounds for acts of participation, thus blurring the lines of causality. To avoid this potential contamination ground, we focus on a political attitude, namely political trust, that is less dependent on this type of context effect. We also rely on new and recent panel data collected in Belgium over the period 2006–2011, and these data allow us to determine how exactly higher education experiences are related to political attitudes. Education is a process that facilitates learning, knowledge and skills. and values, beliefs and habits. The possibility of crucial preparation is left at the initial stage: several people.