Explaining the socio-economic gradient in child outcomes: the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills

Papers in this volume and elsewhere consistently find a strong relationship between children's cognitive abilities and their parents' socio-economic position (SEP). Most studies seeking to explain the paths through which SEP affects cognitive skills suffer from a potentially serious omitted variables problem, as they are unable to account for an important determinant of children's cognitive abilities, namely parental cognitive ability. A range of econometric strategies have been employed to overcome this issue, but in this paper, we adopt the very simple (but rarely available) route of using data that includes a range of typically unobserved characteristics, such as parental cognitive ability and social skills. In line with previous work on the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills, we find that parental cognitive ability is a significant predictor of children's cognitive ability; moreover, it explains one sixth of the socio-economic gap in those skills, even after controlling for a rich set of demographic, attitudinal and behavioural factors. Despite the importance of parental cognitive ability in explaining children's cognitive ability, however, the addition of such typically unobserved characteristics does not alter our impression of the relative importance of other factors in explaining the socio-economic gap in cognitive skills. This is reassuring for studies that are unable to control for parental cognitive ability.

Educating he Women of the Nation: Priscilla Wakefield and the Construction of National Identity, 1798

This article examines the views of the Quaker educationist, Priscilla Wakefield, on the role of women in the construction of British national identity at the end of the eighteenth century. Priscilla Wakefield wrote children\u27s texts in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century England, was interested in the question of women and science and published on the education of women. This article analyses the way in which in Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, with Suggestions for its Improvement (1798) , she based her arguments for a \u27useful\u27 education for women on her views of what constituted the virtues and values of British society. Wakefield was worried by what she perceived to be a growing degeneracy in Britain, which she feared was engendering similarities to society in pre-Revolution France. She saw it as the moral duty of rational mothers to inculcate their children, their servants and their fellow countrywomen into correct modes of being. The article traces the underlying influence of Quaker beliefs on Wakefield\u27s writing and the similarities in her analysis to and differences from that ofher contemporary, Hannah More

Gender, Cosmopolitanism and Transnational Space and Time: Kasuya Yoshi and Girls’ Secondary Education.

This article focuses on Kasuya Yoshi’s comparative text, A Comparative Study of the Secondary Education of Girls in England, Germany and the United States, With a Consideration of the Secondary Education of Girls in Japan, published by Teachers College, Columbia in 1933. The article explores the gendered construction of comparative education and adopts a transnational approach to make women visible as non-state actors constructing educational knowledge, founding institutions and practicing as educationists. The preface to Secondary Education of Girls is used to explore a transnational circulatory regime supporting Kasuya’s travel and study in the USA. Modes of managing meaning used to mediate actions and ideals oriented to both the universal and the particular in the model of modern Japanese womanhood Kasuya scripted in her text, and the elements of the education she prescribed to achieve her ideals, are analysed through notions of vernacular cosmopolitanisms