Political Perspectives

Abstract

All of the chapters until now have been primarily concerned with young children, more specifically, with the emergence of psychological competencies that appear linked to children’s beginning grasp of a societal framework. In a very real sense they are this framework. Based on these developmental accomplishments the children can be said to be active participants in their particular society/culture. (This is in contrast to the predominantly passive accommodation to societal pressures to which infants are exposed from the first day of conception.) Around the age of 2 and beyond, children become active assimilators of society. And assimilation, contrary to a glaring misunderstanding of Piaget’s theory, means essentially an active endogenous structuring that implies both newness and creativity. It is here claimed that the primary overall object of this mental activity is society—society as made sense of and grasped by the developing children, not the adult society, the “real” society.