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Essay / The interconnection between education and politics
Education is an inevitable part of everyone's life. It is an important way to acquire essential knowledge and skills. Education and politics play a crucial role in all areas of life. Likewise, both of these make the world a better place and are important for better living standards and citizenship. Although education and politics share very close and strong relationships. As in democracy, education is a kind of prerequisite for a successful politician. Government officials provide the vision of the type of society they need, and training has been the most important method of achieving this. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Although it is obvious that education and politics are interrelated, there is no doubt that education is strongly correlated with political attitudes and behaviors in Western societies. Highly educated actors participate more intensely in politics, they have higher levels of political interest and knowledge, and they are more tolerant and trusting. All available evidence therefore suggests that education is, or has become, the main gateway to political engagement. There is, however, considerable disagreement over exactly how this gateway works. While some authors argue that education has a direct impact on value patterns and skills, others argue that the emphasis on educational experiences is overemphasized. Cindy Kam and Carl Palmer, for example, argue that education should be viewed as a simple 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 erroneous 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 education's effects has led to no definitive conclusions, in part because of a lack of data. The question of whether college experiences have an additional effect, beyond the stratification already present upon entry into higher education, requires panel data rare in political science. Indeed, the entire debate that followed the publication of the article by Kam and Palmer (2008) is based almost exclusively on an analysis of panel data dating back several decades. Since this period, the methods of access to higher education have changed radically. Furthermore, to date, the study of the effects of higher education has focused on political participation as a dependent variable, while it can be assumed that colleges and university campuses often serve as grounds recruitment for acts of participation, thus blurring the lines of causality. To avoid this potential area of contamination, we focus on a political attitude, namely political trust less dependent on this type of context effect. We also draw on new and recent panel data that were collected in Belgium over the period 2006-2011, and these data allow us to determine exactly how teaching experiences.