Science Foundation (grant number 5004-58473). We would like to thank Bob Blackburn and Véronique Mottier for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. A very special vote of thanks must go to Paul Lambert for the 8 single-spaced pages of highly relevant and incisive comments, some of which will have to wait for another article. Abstract The purpose of this article is to inform researche...

Religion has a powerful influence on learning and development, and this provides an important cultural foundation for stratification processes. Findings from prior studies of the connection between religion and educational attainment are mixed, but most studies point to negative effects of sectarian Protestant affiliation and fundamentalist beliefs in the inerrancy of sacred texts on educationa...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the recruitment of elites in the Western world leads to social cohesion, or to the opposite -social stratification. We show that the main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their recruitment. Although meritocratic selection should result in the best being chosen, we show that m...