Suchergebnisse

Die Verkürzung der Schuldauer am Gymnasium von neun auf acht Jahre
war eine der größten und umstrittensten Reformen des deutschen Bildungssystems seit der
Wiedervereinigung. Theoretische Überlegungen zeigen, dass die G8-Reform soziale
Ungleichheiten bei der schulischen Platzierung sowohl vergrößert als auch verkleinert haben
könnte. Bislang gibt es diesbezüglich jedoch nur wenige empirische Befunde. Vor diesem
Hintergrund untersuchen wir anhand der Mikrozensuserhebungen der Jahre 2008 bis 2012
erstmals den Einfluss auf das Ausmaß der sozialen Ungleichheit beim Besuch der gymnasialen Oberstufe anhand eines Difference-in-Differences Ansatzes, welcher besonders gut dazu geeignet ist, den kausalen Effekt der Reform aufzudecken. Unsere empirischen Ergebnisse sprechen dafür, dass es unter G8 bei höheren Schichten im Vergleich zu niedrigeren Schichten verstärkt zu Ausweichbewegungen auf Schulformen gekommen ist, auf denen die (Fach)Hochschulreife weiterhin nach neun Jahren Sekundarschulbildung erlangt werden kann. Insgesamt werden die schichtspezifischen Unterschiede beim Besuch der gymnasialen Oberstufe durch die Reform aber nicht substanziell beeinflusst.

This study investigates the up-to-now strongly underexplored role of parents' social capital in the school-to-work transition of adolescents. We base our empirical analyses on unique longitudinal largescale data from the German National Educational Panel Study. Parents' social capital is measured with a position generator. Results show that adolescents with lower secondary education have better chances of finding an apprenticeship in a company if their parents know many persons with lower-status occupations for which vocational training is sufficient. This is especially the case for parents' social contacts that have occupations in which many adolescents with lower secondary education are being trained in a company. The contrary is true for adolescents whose parents know many persons with higher-status occupations. Parents' social networks do not show any effects on the quality of these apprenticeships or on the probability of entering school-based vocational training. Overall, our results indicate that parents' social networks are important for a smooth school-to-work transition of their children. Moreover, our analyses confirm the idea that social capital is goal and labour market segment specific.

Previous research casts doubt on whether interpersonal influences on students' expectations exist in highly stratified education systems after students have been tracked into different secondary school types. Against this background, we examine the influence of parents and friends on the educational expectations of secondary school students in the highly stratified German education system. For the analyses we use unique representative data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). In addition to standard cross-sectional analyses, school fixed-effects models and longitudinal fixed-effects panel regressions are conducted, which make it possible to rule out a large number of factors that might be responsible for a spurious relationship. Across all analyses, we consistently find substantive influences of parents and friends on the expectations of secondary school students.

Previous research indicates that social relationships can influence the probability of successfully finding a first job. This paper contributes to this field of research by empirically analysing the rarely studied question, if social networks can help adolescents find an apprenticeship in the strongly company-based vocational training system of Germany. In contrast to most previous studies, not only the youth's networks, but also their mothers' networks are taken into account. In addition to the social, the ethnic composition of the networks is also considered. Event data analyses of German panel data on natives and migrants from the project 'Young Immigrants in the German and Israeli Educational System' show that adolescents' networks have no effect on the success of an apprenticeship search. In contrast, the mothers' networks play a crucial role.

Welche Rolle soll und kann die Religion im gesellschaftlichen Leben spielen? Wo sind ihre Grenzen, was lässt sich beweisen, was ist menschgemachtes, manipulatives Märchen? Der französische Philosoph Voltaire (1694-1778) schrieb unnachgiebig für religiöse Toleranz, aber auch unerbittlich gegen die Religion und ihren Herrschaftsanspruch. Endlich versammelt nun ein Band alle fünf Katechismen Voltaires, in denen er das Thema der Religion auf Erden auslotet - zwei von ihnen erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung. Die Gattung Katechismus, in der die Glaubensinhalte einer Konfession in Frage und Antwort fixiert sind, wird von Voltaire völlig auf den Kopf gestellt. In den prägnanten Dialogen zeigt sich Voltaires Ausnahmetalent, scharfe Kritik und schwere Grundsatzfragen unterhaltsam zu erzählen, pointenreich, voller Ironie. Die Gespräche spielen im alten China, in Aleppo oder Japan, die Figuren sind skeptische Prinzen, angehende Pfarrer oder weltweise Gärtner. Voltaire spricht sich vehement gegen religiösen Fanatismus und Parteienhass, gegen Verfolgung von Andersdenkenden, gegen klerikalen Machtmissbrauch und Aberglauben aus. Aber er meisselt in den fünf Katechismen seine Religionskritik nicht in Stein, sondern öffnet durch Witz und Lebendigkeit Raum für eigenes Nachdenken, das sich von Autoritäten löst. (Verlagstext)

Über das Ende der religiösen Vielfalt und Akzeptanz im alten Rom - eingeläutet durch das Christentum. Das alte Rom war in vielerlei Hinsicht fortschrittlich. Unzählige Götter und Religionen lebten in der Millionenstadt am Tiber nebeneinander - es war eine politische Strategie des Weltreiches, andere Kulturen und deren Rituale zu integrieren, aber auch Religionskritik und Skepsis zu akzeptieren. Wie sich das mit dem Aufkommen des Christentums änderte und wie religiöse Intoleranz und Toleranz entstanden, zeichnet Stephen Greenblatt in seinem Essay nach. Damit zeigt er auch, wie sich aus der kultischen Vielfalt der Antike eine Gesellschaft entwickelte, die auf Reinheit und Einheitlichkeit, auf Zerstörung und Zensur setzte. Vor allem die materialistische Vorstellung völlig unbeteiligter Götter erwies sich bald als etwas, das unter keinen Umständen toleriert werden konnte und dessen Träger (ob Bücher oder Menschen) vernichtet werden musste.

This study investigates how parents' native and migrant contacts in the German labour market affect the likelihood of children obtaining a company-based apprenticeship [dual vocational education and training (VET)] after lower secondary education. Furthermore, it assesses the extent to which characteristics of parents' social networks explain ethnic inequalities in this school-to-work transition. Using longitudinal data from Starting Cohort 4 (ninth-graders) of the National Educational Panel Study, we show that the number of migrant contacts in parents' networks does not affect the outcome of adolescents' apprenticeship search. This applies to both migrant and native adolescents. However, if parents have many native contacts, the chances of adolescents obtaining a company-based apprenticeship increases in both groups. In addition, controlling for the composition of parents' networks substantially reduces the gap between natives and migrants in the transition to dual VET. Further analyses show that this is mainly due to differences in the number of native labour market contacts between native and migrant parents. Our findings indicate that differences in parents' endowment with labour market relevant social capital constitute yet another hurdle for immigrant children in the transition from school to working life.

The influence of friends in shaping students' educational expectations has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in past research. However, few studies have directly tackled the methodological problems associated with estimating such influence effects. In particular, the separation of selection effects - with students selecting friends with similar educational expectations - from influence effects has remained elusive. In this study, we therefore investigate whether friend influence persists once we account for selection effects and other confounding network-related processes. In addition, we quantify the contribution of selection and influence to the similarity of educational expectations among friends. We rely on two-wave longitudinal data on 1,821 German secondary school students in 77 classrooms and multilevel random-coefficients stochastic actor-oriented models for the coevolution of networks and behaviour. Our results demonstrate that both selection and influence contribute to expectation-based similarity and that selection effects are substantial. This shows that without explicitly accounting for selection, estimates of friend influence effects are likely to be biased.

Previous research has shown that educational transitions are decisive for the explanation of social educational inequalities. One key factor for social-class-specific transitions at crucial branching points in the educational system is the difference in educational decisions of higher and lower social classes even at the same level of performance. Therefore, it is often assumed that an institutional setting in which families do not have a free choice, but where transitions are determined by binding teacher recommendations that are based on educational performance, is one possibility to reduce social inequality in educational opportunity. To test the effectiveness of such an institutional arrangement, we use Germany as a strategic test case. We investigate differences in social inequality in educational attainment between German federal states with differing transition rules and examine two changes in the transition regulations that have taken place in one federal state within the past 10 years. Our results indicate that the binding nature of the transition recommendation given by primary schools for the different secondary school types does not substantially alter the effect of social background on the probability of attending the higher secondary school track in secondary level I.