¹ Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 135–136 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² For a short historical background and bibliography on the civics curriculum in American high schools see, inter alia: Quillen, I. James, “Government Oriented Courses in the Secondary School Curriculum,” in Riddle, Donald H. and Cleary, Robert S. (eds.), Political Science in the Social Studies (36 Yearbook, National Council for the Social Studies, 1966), pp. 245–272 Google Scholar; and Patterson, Franklin, “Citizenship and the High School: Representative Current Practices,” in Patterson, , et al., The Adolescent Citizen (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), Chap. 5Google Scholar.

³ See for example: Educational Policies Commission, Learning the Ways of Democracy: A Case Book in Civic Education (Washington: National Education Association of the United States, 1940), Chap. 1Google Scholar; and Holmes, Henry W., “The Civic Education Project of Cambridge,” Phi Delta Kappan, 33 (12, 1951), 168–171 Google Scholar.

⁴ For related bibliography and a general discussion of this problem see: Coleman, James S., “Introduction” in Coleman, James S. (ed.), Education and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 18–25 Google Scholar.

⁵ Pace, C. Robert, “What Kind of Citizens Do College Graduates Become,” Journal of General Education, 3 (04, 1949), 197–202 Google Scholar; Holtzman, W. H., “Attitudes of College Men Toward Non-Segregation in Texas Schools,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 20 (1956), 559–569 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newcomb, Theodore, Personality and Social Change (New York: Dryden, 1943)Google Scholar; Goldsen, Rose, et al., What College Students Think (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1960)Google Scholar; Drucker, A. J. and Remmers, H. H., “Citizenship Attitudes of Graduated Seniors at Purdue University,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 42 (1951), 231–235 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lehman, Irvin, “Changes In Attitudes And Values Associated With College Attendance,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 57 (04, 1966), 89–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Barton, Allen H., Studying the Effects of College Education (New Haven: Edward Hazen Foundation, 1959), p. 76 Google Scholar; McClintock, Charles G. and Turner, Henry A., “The Impact of College upon Political Knowledge, Participation, and Values,” Human Relations, 15 (05, 1962), 163–176 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Newcomb, Theodore M., “The General Nature of Peer Group Influence,” in Newcomb, Theodore M. and Wilson, Everett K., College Peer Groups (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), p. 2 Google Scholar.

⁷ Kornhauser, Arthur, “Changes in the Information and Attitudes of Students in an Economics Class,” Journal of Educational Research, 22 (1930), 288–308 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Albert Somit, et al., “The Effect of the Introductory Political Science Course on Student Attitudes Toward Political Participation,” this Review, 52 (December, 1958), 1129–1132; Schick, Marvin and Somit, Albert, “The Failure to Teach Political Activity,” The American Behavioral Scientist, 6 (01, 1963), 5–8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James A. Robinson, et al., “Teaching with Inter-Nation Simulation and Case Studies,” this Review, 60 (March, 1966), 53–65; and Garrison, Charles, “The Introductory Political Science Course As An Agent of Political Socialization” (Unpublished Dissertation, University of Oregon, 1966)Google Scholar.

⁹ Litt, Edgar, “Civic Education Norms and Political Indoctrination,” American Sociological Review, 28 (02, 1963), 69–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ See, e.g., Cox, C. Benjamin and Cousins, Jack E., “Teaching Social Studies in Secondary Schools and Colleges,” in Massialas, Byron and Smith, Frederick R. (eds.), New Challenges in the Social Studies (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1965), Chap. 4Google Scholar; and Mainer, Robert E., “Attitude Change in Intergroup Programs,” in Remmers, H. H. (ed.), Anti-Democratic Attitudes in American Schools (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1963), pp. 122–154 Google Scholar.

¹¹ Franklin Patterson, et al., op. cit., pp. 71–73; Price, Roy A., “Citizenship Studies in Syracuse,” Phi Delta Kappan, 33 (12, 1951), 179–181 Google Scholar; and Earl E. Edgar, “Kansas Study of Education for Citizenship,” ibid., 175–178.

¹² Remmers, H. H. and Radler, D. H., The American Teenager (New York: Charter, 1962), p. 195 Google Scholar.

¹³ Almond and Verba, op. cit., p. 361.

¹⁴ Hess, Robert D. and Eastern, David, “The Role of the Elementary School in Political Socialization,” The School Review, 70 (1962), 257–265 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Easton, David and Hess, Robert, “The Child's Political World,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 6 (08, 1962), 229–246 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hess, Robert and Torney, Judith, The Development of Political Attitudes In Children (Chicago: Aldine, 1967)Google Scholar; and Greenstein, Fred, Children And Politics (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ On the other hand, Adelson and O'Neil find important political cognitive development taking place during the adolescent years. See Adelson, Joseph and O'Neil, Robert, “The Growth of Political Ideas in Adolescence: The Sense of Community,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4 (September, 1966), 295–306 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹⁶ A regional pattern is present. Appreciably more students in the West and Midwest had taken such courses than was true in the South and, especially, in the Northeast. It appears that this variation did not influence the findings reported below. Other personal and school characteristics did not discriminate among takers and nontakers of civics courses.

¹⁷ For a more detailed account of social studies curriculum offerings sea Jennings, M. Kent, “Correlates of the Social Studies Curriculum: Grades 10–12,” in Cox, Benjamin and Massialas, Byron (eds.), Social Studies in the United States (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1967)Google ScholarPubMed.

¹⁸ Respondents were asked to identify (1) the number of years a U.S. Senator serves; (2) the country Marshall Tito leads; (3) the number of members on the U.S. Supreme Court; (4) the name of the Governor of their state; (5) the nation that during WWII “had a great many concentration camps for Jews”; and (5) whether President Franklin Roosevelt was a Republican or a Democrat.

The six items formed a Guttman scale with a coefficient of reproducibility (CR) of .92.

¹⁹ “Some people seem to think about what's going on in government and public affairs most of the time, whether there's an election going on or not. Others aren't that interested. Would you say you follow what's going on in government and public affairs most of the time, some of the time, only now and then or hardly at all?”

²⁰ Students were asked how often they “read about public affairs and politics” in newspapers or magazines and how often they watched “any programs about public affairs, politics, and the news on television.”

²¹ “Do you talk about public affairs and politics with your friends outside of classes?” (If yes) “How often would you say that is?”

²² David Easton and Jack Dennis, “The Child's Acquisition of Regime Norms: Political Efficacy,” this Review, 61 (March, 1967), 25–38; Almond and Verba, op. cit., Chap. 12; and Campbell, Angus, et al., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley, 1960), pp. 103–105, 480–481 Google Scholar.

²³ The following two items were used to construct a three point political efficacy scale with a CR of .94.

(1) Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can't really understand what's going on.

(2) Voting is the only way that people like my mother and father can have any say about how the government runs things.

²⁴ Agger, Robert E., Goldstein, Marshall, and Pearl, Stanley, “Political Cynicism: Measurement and Meaning,” The Journal of Politics, 23 (08, 1961) 477–506 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ The following six items formed a political cynicism scale which had a CR of .92.

(1) Over the years, how much attention do you feel the government pays to what the people think when it decides what to do ?

(2) Do you think that quite a few of the people running the government are a little crooked not very many are, or do you think hardly any of them are?

(3) Do you think that people in government waste a lot of money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don't waste very much of it?

(4) How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?

(5) Do you feel that almost all of the people running the government are smart people who usually know what they are doing, or do you think that quite a few of them don't seem to know what they are doing?

(6) Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people?

²⁶ See Byron Massialas, “Teaching American Government in High School,” in Cox and Massialas, op. cit., pp. 167–195.

²⁷ The following three agree-disagree questions formed a Guttman scale with a CR of .95.

(1) If a person wanted to make a speech in this community against religion, he should be allowed to speak.

(2) If a Communist were legally elected to some public office around here, the people should allow him to take office.

(3) The American system of government is one that all nations should have.

²⁸ The question wording is found on page 27.

²⁹ Andrews, Frank, Morgan, James, and Sonquist, John, Multiple Classification Analysis (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1967)Google Scholar.

³⁰ School academic quality is based on the percent of seniors going on to four year colleges or universities in each school. This information was obtained from school sources.

³¹ When political interest was examined as a dependent variable in the MCA analysis it was, of course, dropped as a control variable.

³² For convenience partial beta coefficients will be referred to as betas or beta coefficients. The beta coefficient is directly analogous to the eta, but is based on the adjusted rather than the raw mean. It provides a measure of the ability of the predictor to explain variation in the dependent variable after adjusting for the effects of all other predictors. This is not in terms of percent of variance explained. The term beta is used because “the measure is analogous to the standardized regression coefficient, i.e., the regression coefficient multiplied by the standard deviation of the predictor and divided by the standard deviation of the dependent variable, so that the result is a measure of the number of standard deviation units the dependent variable moves when the explanatory variable changes by one standard deviation.” Andrews, op. cit., p. 22.

As mentioned earlier, the MCA program assumes additive effects. While some interaction may be present, a close scrutiny of the statistical analysis makes it doubtful if the impact is particularly large.

³³ In a preliminary analysis the impact of taking social studies courses as a whole was examined. The number of social studies courses taken accounted for little difference in the students' orientations.

³⁴ We were interested in what effect the students' perceptions of the quality of their civics teachers and courses as well as the sex of the teacher might have on the relationships. Students were asked to rank each of the courses they had taken from extremely good to extremely poor. They also ranked the quality of their teachers in the same way. Prior to the MCA analysis the relationship between the civics curriculum and the dependent variables was examined within contingency tables controlled for course and teacher ratings. Course and teacher ratings had no consistent, significant effect upon the relationships. Controls for the sex of the student's teacher also produced no significant differences.

³⁵ See Shaver, James P., “Reflective Thinking, Values, and Social Studies Textbooks,” School Review, 73 (1965), 226–257 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frederick R. Smith and John J. Patrick, “Civics: Relating Social Study to Social Reality,” and Byron Massialas, “Teaching American Government in High School,” both in Cox and Massialas (eds.), op. cit., pp. 105–127, 167–195.

³⁶ In addition to such classics as Myrdal's, Gunnar An Americzn Dilemma (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944 Google Scholar), see more recent works: Pettigrew, Thomas F ., A Profile of the American Negro (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964)Google Scholar; Brink, William and Harris, Louis, The Negro Revolution in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964)Google Scholar; Clark, Kenneth B., Dark Ghetto (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)Google Scholar; Killian, Lewis and Grigg, Charles, Racial Crises in America (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964)Google Scholar; Matthews, Donald R. and Prothro, James. W., Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1966)Google Scholar; Marvick, Dwaine, “The Political Socialization of the American Negro,” The Annals, 361 (September, 1965), 112–127 Google Scholar; and Kvaraceus, William C., et al., Negro Self Concept: Implication for School and Citizenship (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1965)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Parental education was used as a summary control variable because we felt that it best captures the tone of the whole family environment as well as other sources of socialization.

³⁸ We have borrowed this method of adjusting “correct” answers from Stokes, Donald E., “Ideological Competition of British Parties,” paper presented at 1964 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois Google Scholar.

³⁹ Kardiner, Abram and Ovesey, Lionel, The Mark of Oppression (Cleveland: The World Publishing Co. [a Meridian book], 1962)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ The beta coefficient for White students is +.07.

⁴¹ In 1942 Gunnar Myrdal completed a comprehensive codification of the Negro culture and circumstances in America. He maintained that Negroes in this country were “exaggerated Americans,” who believed in the American Creed more strongly than Whites. Gunnar Myrdal, op. cit.

⁴² The Negro subsample was not large to begin with, and a regional control in addition to the control for parental education reduced cell frequencies even further. Because the differential effects of parental education were found primarily between students whose parents had only an elementary school education versus those with high school or college education, we combined students from the latter two categories into one category. This retained the substance of the original education break in the South, but it still left only a small number of students outside the South whose parents had an elementary school education or less. In order to enlarge this latter group the parental education cutting point in the non-South was moved to a point between those parents who were at least high school graduates and those who had only some high school or less. If there are important regional differences in curriculum effect they should be apparent under these control conditions.

The respective raw and weighted N's for the four groupings are as follows: southern low educated—33, 44; southern high educated—48, 64; non-southern low educated—45, 42; non-southern high educated—53, 50.

⁴³ See Almond and Verba, op. cit., Chap. 12; Kenneth P. Langton, “Peer Group and School and the Political Socialization Process,” this Review 61 (September, 1967), 751–758; and Levin, M. L., “Social Climates and Political Socialization,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 25 (Winter, 1961), 506–606 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Haveman, Ernest and West, Patricia, They Went to College (New York: Harcourt, 1952)Google Scholar.