| During the adolescence, the development
of political ideology becomes apparent in the individual: ideology here is
defined as the presence of roughly consistent attitudes, more or less organized
in reference to a more encompassing set of general principles. As such,
political ideology is dim or absent at the beginning of adolescence. Its
acquisition by the adolescent, in even the most modest sense, requires the
acquisition of relatively sophisticated cognitive skills; the ability to manage
abstractness, to synthesize and generalize, to imagine the future. These are
accompanied by a steady advance in the ability to understand
principles. The child's rapid acquisition of political knowledge also promotes the growth of political ideology during adolescence. By knowledge I mean more than the dull "facts" such as the composition of country government, that the child is exposed to in the conventional ninth-grade school course. Nor do I mean only information on current political realities. These are facts of knowledge, but they are less critical than the adolescent's absorption of a feeling for those many unspoken assumptions about the political system that comprise the{{U}} common ground of understanding,{{/U}} for example, what the state can "appropriately" demand of its citizens, and vice versa, or the "proper" relationship of government to subsidiary social institutions, such as the schools and churches. Thus, political knowledge is the awareness of social assumptions and relationships as well as of objective facts. Much of the naivete that characterizes the younger adolescent's grasp of politics stems not from an ignorance of "facts" but from an incomplete comprehension of the common conventions of the system, of which is and not customarily done, and of how and why it is or is not done. Yet I do not want to over-emphasize the significance of increased political knowledge in forming adolescent ideology, Over the years I have become progressively disenchanted about the centrality of such knowledge and have come to believe that much current work in political socialization, by relying too heavily on its apparent acquisition, has been misled about the tempo of political understanding in adolescence. Just as young children can count numbers in series without grasping the principle of ordination, young adolescents may have in their heads many random hits of political information without a secure understanding of those concepts that would give order and meaning to the information. Children's minds pick up bits and pieces of data, but until the adolescent has grasped the encompassing function that concepts and principles provide, the data remain fragmented, random, disordered. |