Search

The sibling correlation (SC), which estimates the total effect of family background (i.e., social origins), can be interpreted as measuring a society's inequality of opportunity. Its sensitivity to observed and unobserved factors makes the SC an all-encompassing measure and an attractive choice for comparative research. We gather and summarize all available estimates of SCs in educational attainment (M =.46, SD =.09) and employ meta-regression to explore variability in these estimates. First, we find significantly lower SCs in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark than in the United States, with U.S. correlations roughly.10 (i.e., 25%) higher. Most other (primarily European) countries in our study are estimated to fall in between these countries and the United States. Second, we find a novel Great Gatsby Curve–type positive association between income inequality in childhood and the SC, both cross-nationally and within countries over time. This finding supports theoretical accounts of the Great Gatsby Curve that emphasize the role of educational inequality as a link between economic inequality and social immobility. It implies that greater equality of educational opportunity likely requires reduced economic inequality. Additionally, correlations between sisters are modestly higher, on average, than those between brothers or all siblings, and we find no overall differences between cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility, health, education, and other out comes of interest to demographers are the product of an individual's genetic makeup and their social environment. Yet, gene x environment (GxE) research deploys a limited toolkit on the genetic side to study the gene--environment interplay, relying on polygenic scores (PGSs) that reflect the influence of genetics on levels of an out come. In this article, we develop a genetic summary measure better suited for GxE research: variance poly genic scores (vPGSs), which are PGSs that reflect genetic contributions to plasticity in out comes. First, we use the UK Biobank (N ~ 408,000 in the analytic sample) and the Health and Retirement Study (N ~ 5,700 in the analytic sample) to compare four approaches to constructing PGSs for plasticity. The results show that widely used methods for discovering which genetic variants affect out come variability fail to serve as distinctive new tools for GxE. Second, using the PGSs that do capture distinctive genetic contributions to plasticity, we analyze heterogeneous effects of a UK education reform on health and educational attainment. The results show the properties of a useful new tool for population scientists studying the interplay of nature and nurture and for population-based studies that are releasing PGSs to applied researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economist turned entrepreneur Say was uncertain about his future in 1814 when he was commissioned by the French government to document British industrial progress at a critical point of the industrial takeoff. This trip offered the opportunity to observe the economic life of a different country and to deepen his knowledge of the economic consequences of parliamentarism or the Corn Laws. He also developed a specific understanding of the changes occurring in Britain stressing economies of scale, the role of coal for steam, and the horrific situation of the working class. As key causes, he identified British naval domination of the seas and, more surprisingly, the general distortion induced by very heavy taxation. Through his travel, Say also imported new views about education that he disseminated in France before turning himself to the teaching of economics, starting, at forty-eight years of age, an academic career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a college course on the history of British imperialism and the dynamics of race, gender and class in the nineteenth century. Course description; Information on the reading requirements for the course; Principles and objectives of the course; Plan of action.

An essay concerning difficulties faced by students of the U.S. in studying British romanticism. Topics discussed include difficulties faced by students in understanding romantic poetry and unfamiliar historic events, handbook guides for studying romanticism and activities taken up by teachers in making students understand romanticism. Other topics include students perception romanticism and analyzing summary written by students using Latent semantic analysis (LSA) program.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (ca. 1820s-1920s) the US and British governments utilized elementary education as a tool of assimilation. Huge numbers of Indian and Irish children confronted educational systems designed to separate them from local cultural values. Much top-down official evidence is available for scholars seeking to understand the nature of these campaigns. However, the problem of finding the voices of those at the receiving end--and of attempting to discover pupil agency, as the recent paradigm in childhood research advocates--is especially severe for historians. Unlike anthropologists or sociologists, historians cannot observe or interview as children those whom they study. Occasionally evidence survives of pupils' voices of long ago. But often the historian must rely heavily on autobiographical reminiscences recorded decades later. This article suggests that by employing five critical tests we can use autobiography to gain some sense of narrators' earlier experiences as schoolchildren and of them as active agents in their own lives. Indeed, we often have little else to provide historical perspectives on assimilationist schooling "from the bottom up." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social science literature on the comparative history of the welfare state offers conflicting accounts of the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. At first blush, the comparative history of health care policy in the United States and the United Kingdom seems to affirm the dominant view that the U.S. and U.K. welfare states have diverged substantially during the twentieth century. A comparison of U.S. and U.K. health policy, however, suggests that there are more parallels and points of tangency between the two systems than are readily apparent. The comparative history of health policy over the past century reveals common political and policy challenges and frequent interchanges of policy ideas, and helps uncover the political dynamics behind the development of health policy in the two countries, which can, in turn, help illuminate the contemporary politics of reform in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the study and teaching of English literature and English language in Great Britain. It explains that many universities are offering this degrees jointly for pedagogic and employability reasons. For instance the University of Central Lancashire requires their students to use classroom activities and assessment to reflect on their program of study and to articulate the skills they have developed in studying language and literature.

Discusses the state of history of economics thought (HET) education/teaching in Great Britain. Effect of the homogenization of the higher education; Decline in HET education; Factors responsible for the decline in HET education; Demand for HET courses.