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Sense of justice in school and civic behavior

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Abstract

Adult citizenship requires a gradual acquisition of political culture—knowledge, attitudes, skills and patterns of behavior necessary to engage in political action. This is especially the case in democratic societies, which are based on citizens’ participation. Hence, education for citizenship is uniformly considered as a major mission of the common school, along with its central task of imparting knowledge. In this paper we add to the abundant empirical work on the contributing factors to and behavioral consequences of civic education, focusing on the role of the students’ sense of justice in school. We refine previous approaches by distinguishing among three dimensions of the sense of justice, two pertaining to the distributive, and one to the procedural justice. We investigate the effects of these dimensions on four kinds of civic behavior relevant to school life: academic dishonesty, violence, extracurricular activity in school and community volunteering. The study was carried out among about 5000 Israeli middle school students (8th and 9th grades). Findings suggest that, overall, students who perceive their teachers as just tend to refrain from violence and to engage to a greater extent in extra-curricular school activity and community volunteering.

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Notes

  1. In defining it as a school feature, we lean on an abundant literature on organizational culture and climate, which are usually measured as the aggregated perceived attitudes or evaluations of the organization’s members regarding various aspects of its life (e.g., Anderson 1982; Hargreavas 1995; Schein 2004; Van Houtte 2005).

  2. This definition is a generalization covering a continuum spanning secular (non-believers), “traditional,” religious and ultra-Orthodox Jews. However, in both the political and the educational scene, the secular-religious cleavage represents two different and, in some cases, contradictory cultures.

  3. Recent decades have also been marked by an expansion of the ultra-Orthodox sector, which is State-funded but almost completely autonomous. It rarely cooperates with academic research efforts and did not participate in the current investigation either.

  4. For a detailed historical account of civic education in the heterogeneous Israeli society, see Ichilov (2003), Ichilov et al. (2005).

  5. The index is an administrative measure based on socioeconomic and demographic (center/periphery) properties of the school’s student population and serves as the basis for the allocation of additional resources to schools.

  6. Since age/grade-level differences did not appear in most of our analyses, the two grades indices were combined.

  7. We assumed that the four sampled classrooms adequately represented the student population in the school. Parents’ education was preferred over the disadvantage index, as the latter is also based on non-SES parameters.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation, Grant No. 568/09.

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  1. School of Education, NCJW Research Institute for Innovation of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91505, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

    Nura Resh

  2. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of Haifa, 31905, Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel

    Clara Sabbagh

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  1. Nura Resh
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Correspondence to Nura Resh.

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Resh, N., Sabbagh, C. Sense of justice in school and civic behavior. Soc Psychol Educ 20, 387–409 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-017-9375-0

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