Interpreting Civic Aspects at School Class Level in Denmark – an Educational Anthropological Perspective

This paper reports a secondary analysis carried out on Danish CivEd data from the upper secondary population. The analysis is of significance to the reported civic international research in two ways. First, by defining the school class as the research unit instead of the individual pupil. Second, by constructing six new attitude scales to describe the classes in ways which relate to the values of modern Danish society i.e., attitudes concerning global orientation, individualistic values, political apathy, tolerance related to minorities and nationalism. An analysis of multivariate correlation carried out on the Danish CivEd data which represent 141 school classes at the upper secondary level reveals two completely contrast my groups of classes. One pole, the so-called ‘individualistic’ one, is characterized by a relatively high degree of individualism and a high degree of protectionism plus a relatively low degree of the following: political engagement, inclusion of civil rights of ethnic minorities, inclusion of civil rights of anti-democratic groups and global orientation. The opposite group of classes, called the ‘collectivistic’ one, is defined by reversing each of the six elements. This result show that individual pupils are not distributed among classes in a random manner, instead they concentrate in social units formed by many different macro-systemic conditions: type of school, local area, family background, gender distribution. The three levels of results individual, school class and nation – provide ground for theorizing the results in an educational anthropological perspective.