During 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,
though perhaps tacit, 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 dreary “facts,” such as the composition of county government that the child
is exposed to in the conventional ninth-grade civics course. Nor do I mean only
information on current political realities. These are facets of knowledge, but
they are less critical than the adolescent’s absorption, often unwitting, of a
feeling for those many unspoken assumptions about the political system that
comprise the common ground of understanding—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 naiveté that characterizes the younger
adolescent’s grasp of politics stems not from an ignorance of “facts” but from
conventions of the system, of what is and is not customarily done, and of how
and why it is or is not done.
Yet I do not want to overemphasize 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 bits of political information
without a secure understanding of those concepts that would give order and
meaning to the information.
Like magpies, children’s minds pick up bits and
pieces of data. If you encourage them, they will drop
these at your feet—Republicans and Democrats, the tripartite division of the
federal system, perhaps even the capital of Massachusetts. But until the
adolescent has grasped the integumental function that concepts and principles
provide, the data remain fragmented, random, disordered.
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