How can education be valued

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Countries show very different levels of development. These differences do not only pertain to economic development, but also to the strength of public services. Indicators of income, health and education constitute the so-called Human Development Index HDI , a measure of development that combines economic prosperity and well-being [ 11 ].

The highest-ranking countries in terms of HDI include countries like Norway, Canada and Japan, whereas the lowest-ranking countries include African countries like Niger and Sierra Leone. Inhabitants of poorly developed countries countries with a low HDI generally tend to endorse a more closed, conservative worldview with an emphasis on traditional values and economic and physical security, whereas citizens of higher HDI societies typically endorse a more open-minded, liberal worldview, emphasizing freedom, individualization and self-expression [ 12 , 13 , 14 ].

We refer to these values in terms of liberalization values. Individuals are heavily influenced by the values of others around them [ 15 ] and as a result, the presence of people endorsing particular values in terms of less or more liberalization constitutes a value climate which serves as a guiding norm.

Because a liberalized climate is a context par excellence for education to increase such values among its students [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ], we hypothesize that participation in education has a stronger liberalizing effect on citizens of higher HDI countries compared to citizens of lower HDI countries Hypothesis 1.

Sociological studies already have shown that the development of a liberalized climate is a basis for the transition from industrialized to post-industrialized, innovative and knowledge-based societies [ 12 , 13 , 14 ]. However, in the present study, we are particularly interested in how participation in education changes the mind of the individual.

In psychological literature, it is an established finding that conservative, closed-minded people are oriented toward the preservation of the status quo and that they often tend to oppose change, whereas liberal people often judge change to be necessary [ 16 ]. There is also ample evidence that conservative individuals tend to be more closed-minded, prefer clear structures, and lack openness [ 17 , 18 ]. Such mindsets clearly do not constitute a sound psychological basis for innovation to occur [ 19 , 20 ].

The hypothesized changes in terms of liberalized mindset of individuals may add up and eventually increase the innovation potential of their country. For these reasons, Hypothesis 2 states a mediated moderation effect in which the interaction effect between education and HDI on innovation works through increased liberalization. The present study included data from representative samples administered in Wave 5 — and 6 — of the World Values Survey WVS , and the Wave of the European Values Study EVS , which use almost identical questionnaires and methodologies [ 21 , 22 ].

Our final data included , participants from 96 samples from different countries across six continents. We included educational level and liberalization values as individual-level measures.

We used two indicators of education level for details, see S1 File. To measure liberalization values, we computed an aggregated scale based on the items that have been used in multiple WVS rounds to construct the Inglehart-Welzel cultural map of the world [ 12 , 13 , 14 ] for details, see S1 File.

We also distinguished between two bipolar components that constitute liberalized mentality. Secular-rational values give high priority to freedom as opposed to traditional values that emphasize authority, religion, and family values. Self-expression or emancipative values give high priority to individualization under the form of self-expression, subjective well-being and quality of life as opposed to survival values that place emphasis on economic and physical security.

The analyses of these two distinct components of liberalization yielded results similar to the aggregated scale and can be found in S1 File. A description of the methods can be found in the online appendix S1 File. Because participants individual level were nested within countries contextual level , we first investigated an empty intercept-only model. The intraclass coefficients ICC was large. All independent variables were grand-mean centered [ 27 ], and we used full-information maximum-likelihood estimates with robust standard errors.

For none of our variables was the proportion of missing values higher than 0. A multilevel model MLM based on a random coefficient model [ 27 ] was conducted.

We explored the variance in the slopes, testing differences in the relation between education and liberalized mindset across countries. Inclusion of gender, age, and religiosity in the first step of the multilevel regression did not change the pattern of results. For the sake of parsimony, we only report the results without background variables. As shown in Table 1 and in line with previous studies, education is positively related to liberalization values and individuals in higher HDI countries show higher overall levels of liberalization values than individuals in lower HDI countries.

Moreover, consistent with Hypothesis 1, stronger relationships between education and liberalization values emerged in higher HDI countries compared to lower HDI countries. Again, the association between education and innovation was stronger in high HDI countries. Next, a mediational multilevel path model was examined to test whether individual-level education and country-level HDI relate to country-level innovation via individual-level liberalization values Fig 2 for the code in MPlus, see S1 File.

In other words, the liberalizing effect of education which is particularly strong in higher HDI countries further relates to higher country-level innovation.

Note: Variables in capital letters represent country-level variables. Although these analyses confirm our Hypotheses, it should be acknowledged that previous studies have revealed that education increases human capital which leads to innovation [ 1 , 2 ], especially in developed countries [ 3 , 4 ].

We thus further tested the mediational multilevel model controlling for levels of human capital. Unfortunately, EVS and WVS do not contain measures of human capital, and this variable could therefore not be included at the individual level. Instead, a national indicator of human capital was included as a control variable. This indicator consisted of the country-level test scores on the standardized PISA test of mathematics, reading abilities and scientific knowledge, administered among year olds.

Moreover, through this increased liberalization, education resulted in higher innovation ratings in higher HDI countries. We draw two conclusions.