But I'm sure teenagers still think about why they should do what they're told to do, which I think is amounts to political theory as it applies to them. It was either in my teens or early 20s that it occurred to me that criminal and terrorist organisations behaved like legitimate states in claiming a right to tax and otherwise coerce some more or less defined groups of people. So the Mafia would require businesses to pay them off in their areas, while the PLO would collect contributions from the Palestinian diaspora. At the time, the PLO was trying to be given an established position at the United Nations - which I understood to be to legitimise a developing de facto quasi-state authority. I was also thinking about how the now entirely legitimate Irish state had emerged from a terrorist organisation. Some time later I discovered that this understanding had been expounded rather more authoritatively by the German sociologist, Max Weber.mosy wrote:In terms of teaching politics in schools, at one time, a GCSE in "British Constitution" was considered a soft option (versus economics, say) and considered relatively useless in pragmatic terms in the same way that "media studies" is today. My instinct tells me that many teens are just not interested in achieving the historical grasp of "how we arrived at this point" when they'd much rather be learning how to animate a computer game.
I've never actually read anything by Weber - I'm told he's the sort of writer who gives German academics a bad reputation - but I've also been thinking about some other ideas he developed, which might relate more to teenagers' actual experience of authority, and how it connects to the formal politics of the British Constitution. I refer to his classification of types of authority into traditional, legal-rational and charismatic. For a teenager, traditional authority will be experienced in the first instance from parents, and teachers, up to a point. They'll also have experience of charismatic authority - doing something because the person suggesting they do - probably one of their peers, but maybe a teacher - it is cool, popular, or, looking to the dark side, the class bully. Legal-rational authority, the stuff of constitutions, is harder, because its value only emerges from seeing the weaknesses of the two other types of authority. It's one of the reasons I so much enjoyed this book I posted about earlier this year.
So that's what I meant by writing that learning about politics and how our systems have developed required some kind of sociological background - as well as some economics. I think it would be great if kids were thinking and talking this sort of stuff - even if not necessarily referring to Weber, Marx, Adam Smith or whoever.
I'm not sure it makes one bit of difference what older people think younger people _should_ be interested in as either they will or they won't be - in other words, you can't make youngsters be interested in things if they're not any more than one can make an adult similarly.