ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors trace empirically—using their data on elementary school curricula in many countries—the educational career of subjects related to values education: moral and religious education, civics and social studies, showing where and when they appear in the official curriculum. School curricula reflect prevailing social, cultural and political concepts whether implicitly or explicitly: different attitudes toward children and childhood, taken-for-granted definitions of the ‘educated individual’, the institutional methods through which the ‘ideal’ education takes place, the relation of the individual to society and to the state, and the like. The socialization of the student as a moral being has been a core concern of mass education since its rise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is no period or place in which mass education is conceived to be a narrowly technical enterprise, involving knowledge and competence in language or mathematics independent of broader socialization into the moral order.
