The worldwide globalization of civics education topics from 1955 to 1995

This dissertation explores the changing content of civics education throughout the world from World War II until 1995. In framing this research, I highlight two models of worldwide society (the world model of national society and the world model of global society) and examine civics education from the perspective of these models.; This dissertation also begins to explain the process through which this change in models of civics education takes place. I explore two organizational carriers of civics education information that I suggest are central to the worldwide development and dissemination of civics education, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the civics education community in the United States.; The findings from these analyses offer evidence that from 1955 to 1995, there was a shift from a worldwide model of national civics education to a worldwide model of global civics education. The data also suggests that there is a decrease over time in the percent of countries that include "national" topics and an increase over time in the percent of countries that include "global" topics in the tables of contents of their educational material.; The analyses of the institutional carriers of civics education explores the history of civics education efforts in the United States and UNESCO as well as the relationship between the U.S. and UNESCO over time, particularly along civics education lines. Regression analysis is undertaken in order to measure the extent to which connectedness to civics efforts in UNESCO and the United States predicts the emphasis on global civics content in the tables of contents of worldwide civics education material. I also explore the effect of these linkage variables on each separate civics topic in the analysis. For the U.S. case, I also analyze the major topical emphasis of the tables of contents from 30 textbooks dating from 1776-1995.; The findings from these analyses indicate that linkages to both the U.S. and UNESCO are significant predictors of the extent to which countries in this analysis emphasize global civics content. These findings also suggest that wealthy, non-western European countries such as Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, and Singapore are more likely to emphasize global civics content. When the data are broken down by time periods (1955-1965 and 1985-1995), it appears that connectedness to the United States is a better predictor of global civics content at Time I and that UNESCO is a better predictor at Time II.; The analyses on specific civics topics show that the emphasis on the individual person in the first time period is influenced by the linkage to the U.S., to UNESCO and to the combination of the two carriers. At the second time period in the analysis, a country's civic education linkages to UNESCO and the combination of U.S. and UNESCO help predict the emphasis on democracy, and a country's linkage to the U.S. helps predict the emphasis on the environment. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...