Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment: How Important Are Children’s Personality Characteristics?

This study examines the role of a wide range of personality characteristics—such as the Big Five personality traits, self-esteem, goal pursuit/adjustment, social behavior, and educational aspirations—for the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment in Germany, and compares their relative importance with that of cognitive skills. We use information on more than 8,000 students from the German National Educational Panel Study. We find that personality characteristics do not mediate the association between parents’ and children’s attainment of the university entrance qualification (the Abitur) by age 19/20. Only educational aspirations are a strong mediator for intergenerational educational transmission. A few personality characteristics moderate intergenerational educational transmission, and they do so in favor of children with high-educated parents either as Matthew effects or compensatory advantages. In contrast to personality characteristics, cognitive skills act as strong mediators, while moderation is rather weak when accounting for personality characteristics—but again, they work in favor of privileged children. Our German study reveals similarities but also differences compared with the mostly U.S.- and U.K.-based research and inspires to rethink the importance of personality characteristics and cognitive skills for intergenerational education attainment.

Toward A Political Ecology in Lydia Maria Child’s “Chocorua’s Curse”

“Chocorua's Curse,” Lydia Maria Child's retelling of a White Mountain legend, found its way into middle class Boston homes through its publication in the 1830 gift book, The Token, accompanied by an engraving based on a Thomas Cole painting. Child's short sketch contrasts with typical iterations of the tale—and with the several paintings of the dramatic pyramidal peak by Cole—by its inclusion of homes spaces, a female figure, and a sense of the landscape as a watershed and not merely the iconic mountain peak. In addition, using ideas about household economy, educational transmission, and sympathy, Child prefigures ways of writing about the ecological flow of energy and materials through systems that include human and nonhuman entities. With this reading, the poison intended for a “troublesome” fox is an essential part of the subsequent chain of revenge killings and doubles with the final curse on the waters. Using the trope of sympathetic transmission, I argue that Child anticipates ecological thinking through a gendered lens. Material and emotional energy move through human and nonhuman entities, and mindful consideration can perhaps thwart the disaster caused by the men who, as critics have noted, seem disengaged from larger social systems.

Trends in Education Mobility Across Time and Place in the Early 20th Century US

This paper uses data covering birth cohorts between 1900-1950 in the US to examine correlations in schooling between fathers and sons across time and place of birth. Using CPS data with special modules that capture parental education, findings suggest gradual increases in educational mobility across the first five decades of the 20th century. There is also geographic (regional) variation that is both large and persistent, with areas of the South showing educational transmission rates that are twice as high as areas in the Northeast.

Transmission and transformation in higher education: Indigenisation, internationalisation and transculturality

There have been various approaches to the transmission and transformation of systems, practices, knowledge and concepts in higher education in recent decades, chief among which are drives towards indigenisation, on the one hand, and towards internationalisation, on the other. After briefly discussing and dispensing with radical versions of these, theories that reject any claim to validity or legitimacy by the rival approach, this article examines more nuanced accounts that deserve appropriately serious consideration. Thus, in the former instance, there is an emphasis on the local that nonetheless acknowledges a debt to the global, whereas conversely the emphasis on the global is seen as compatible with an acknowledgement of diversity, difference and particularity. What is gained and what is lost in these various approaches to educational transmission and transformation? After reflecting, in this regard, on lessons from both Africa and Europe – in particular, on the debates in South Africa around Africanisation and decolonisation, and in Germany around global interdependence – I cautiously endorse the idea of ‘transculturality’ (as contrasted with ‘multiculturality’ and ‘interculturality’) as a promising philosophical perspective on transmission of knowledge and practices, and as conceptualising transformation of higher education. The role of philosophy, in particular, consists in part in counteracting the hegemony of both traditional and homogenising (‘colonising’) authority.