Doing PhD = Investigating a mystery...

You know, if I'm not an academic, I think I would be a police investigator, doctor or journalist. I love investigating and trying to solve puzzles. Once you get me hooked on an issue or a problem, I am constantly perplexed and trying to seek to understand, find evidence, and solve the "crime", or form the most coherent story I can about what has happened.

So what happened with my study?

There is this law article that I have refused to read for over five years since I first discovered it (White, 2009). I knew it was related to what I study, but because it's from another field, I'm hesitant to read it. I shouldn't have been. So far, of the very few law articles I have read, I have found them to be exceptionally eloquent and well-argued. Maybe it's the training of the lawyer.

Yes, so I finally picked up this thick piece. It's very thick, but as it is with the way law articles are structured, most of the bulk comes from the footnotes in microprint containing a lot of "evidence", a lot of citations and notes. And I really enjoyed reading this piece though it's written in a style I'm not so used to - argument after argument.

And I was referred back to the first IEA Civic Education Study. In this study, a very strong negative correlation was found between students who practiced patriotic rituals and their democratic knowledge and attitudes (Torney, Oppenheim & Farnen, 1975). This was a very strong finding, BUT no one seems to have carried on from there... In the next IEA Civic Education Study, they simply said that they decided to focus more on patriotic attitudes rather than practices, and they say that most nations no longer carry out patriotic rituals anyway (Torney et al., 2001)... Naturally, in the next IEA ICCS, again, no more mention of patriotic rituals (Schulz et al., 2010)...

Because of this, our knowledge about patriotic rituals is so scarce and we are all referring back to a study done in 1975 that does not even clarify the relationship between patriotic rituals and democratic values. I mean, you cannot say that it's because of practicing these rituals that students develop undemocratic views. There's no cause-and-effect relationship. Maybe it is schools that tend to focus on patriotic rituals that have less time to focus on teaching democratic values that have led to this?

More importantly, what are patriotic rituals? This report only tells us it is stuff such as flag raising ceremonies. But what  happens during a ceremony such as these. What other behaviours constitute patriotic rituals? How about the area of my interest - commemorative events? What's the role of symbols?

Why are so few people interested in this area of study? Maybe it's not worth studying, or maybe I have discovered a mystery that has to be solved!

Isn't doing a PhD fun? :D

(Let me self-indulge for a little while, I've been struggling for sometime with the topic and conceptual framework and just trying to put the various things I read about together.)

References

White, B. T. (2009). Ritual, emotion, and political belief: The search for the constitutional limit to patriotic education in public schools. Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 09-06.

Torney, J. V., Oppenheim, A. N., & Farnen, R. F. (1975). Civic education in ten countries: An empirical study Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Torney-Purta, J., Lehmann, R., Oswald, H., & Schulz, W. (2001). Citizenship and education in twenty-eight countries: Civic knowledge and engagement at age fourteen. Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

Schulz, W., Ainley, J., Fraillon, J., Kerr, D., & Losito, B. (2010). ICCS 2009 International Report: Civic knowledge, attitudes, and engagement among lower-secondary school students in 38 countries. Retrieved from Amsterdam: