How teaching humanities at school influences democracy?
The development of the country is shaped by the education its citizens get. If we look at all texts dedicated to state building as scholarly papers, political speeches or social philosophy works, education is often mentioned as the universal answer: educate kids about horrors of racism, sexism, inequality and intolerance and these problems won’t exist.
In my last blog, I argued that humanities help us to better choose between alternative ways of institutional development. Humanities tend to explain to children why autocratic or totalitarian systems are bad, they tend to cultivate the desire for freedom of choice. So the logic is the following: if in the school curriculum humanities are considered to be at least as important as STEM, there is a big chance that the country will welcome democracy with open arms. Respectively if humanities are considered to be second-sort subjects there is a high probability that the regime will remain (or will become) autocratic.
There are good examples: USSR and modern Russia, China, Vietnam and Singapore are all strong advocates of “maths — first” school education program and are all autocracies, while western democracies as United Kingdom, France and US always had strong liberal arts based school curriculum.
To test this hypothesis a big cross-country analysis is needed. The urgent question is data: how can we see where maths is favoured over humanities? I found only one multinational index that can be used to compare two types of education: Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an education test among 15-years olds done by OECD in around 70 countries. PISA tests three vectors of knowledge: maths, reading (not spelling and speed, but text analysis) and sciences.
In order to see which is more important in the school curriculum: humanities or maths — we will compare reading and maths sections inside each country. In the table countries with school education biased towards humanities will be coloured in green and countries biased towards maths will be left white. For example, Norway has an average score of 502 in Maths and 513 in Reading so we colour it in green, while Vietnam scores 495 in Maths and 487 in Reading so we leave it white. My hypothesis is that democracies will be mostly green, while autocracies will be mostly white.
Why are we comparing PISA results inside one state and don’t make a cross-country analysis? We want to see the situation inside a country and not to see which country is the best. The idea is that if humanities are perceived at least as important as STEM the country is more probable to be democratic. What we are looking at is the balance between subjects in the school curriculum, we are not comparing the performance at the test.
To see the level of democracy we take “The Economist democracy index” which includes electoral process and pluralism, political participation, political culture, civic liberties and other indicators.
So here is what I did: I took the ultimate full PISA database available and sorted the countries using The Economist democracy index (among the PISA participants Norway is the best and Kazakhstan is the worst in democracy index). In the list I chose the countries where the average reading score is better than the average maths score and highlighted them in green:
In order for my hypothesis to be true democratic states should be predominantly green (curriculum biased towards humanities), while autocracies should be predominantly white (curriculum biased towards math).
At the first glance the data doesn’t seem to show anything, so we need to do a small quantitative analysis.
We can try several methods to analyse the data:
1)10 highest vs 10 lowest
We can see that among 10 most democratic states (from Norway to Australia) 7 are green (70%) while among 10 least democratic countries (from FYROM to Kazakhstan) only 4 are green (40%).
2)20 highest vs 20 lowest
Among 20 most democratic countries (from Norway to the USA) 12 countries are green (60%), while among 20 least democratic states (from Kazakhstan to Romania) only 6 are green (30%).
3) Divide by half (The number of countries is odd, that is why there are 2 numbers)
Democratic half (from Norway to Latvia): 18–19 green states (54,5–56 %)
Autocratic half (from Kazakhstan to Latvia): 16–17 green states (48–50%)
At the moment we can see that if we take an equal number of countries from the top of the list and from the bottom of the list, at the top there are always more green countries than at the bottom.
Now we can compare how the difference between maths and reading correlates with democracy levels.
On the figure on the x-axis we see reading score minus maths score and on the y-axis we see The Economist Democracy Index (Norway 9,93; Kazakhstan 3,06). The correlation is 0,2558. This is considered to be “small to medium” where small is 0,10 and medium is 0,30.
So what conclusions can we make? On the full sample there is no convincing correlation. I think this can be explained by the diversity of the countries with democracy index between 6 and 9. However, if we compare top countries with the bottom ones, as we did in the green-white table, we consistently have positive results.
There should be some explanation for the contradiction between the 0,2558 correlation and consistent results in the first analysis.
Possibly technologically developed countries as China or Singapore are taken back in their social and political development towards democracy exactly because of their bias towards maths. Maybe this trade-off these countries make doesn’t let children understand the ideas of liberal arts which, if our hypothesis is true, increases the stability of undemocratic regime. This can potentially explain the predominantly white bottom of the list.
This is an amateurish analysis, so, unfortunately, we can’t take these conclusions for granted. I am sure that we need to control PISA results on many different variables and maybe there is some other data which suits this research much better than PISA. This was just an attempt to start thinking in this direction and I hope that either I or someone else dives deeper into the topic and checks these hypothesises professionally.
Any suggestions on the reasons of the contradiction between two methods are very welcome in the comments!
