POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION OF CHILDREN AS A SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION OF THE “POLITICS OF CHILDREN”

Abstract

The article examines the importance of the political socialization of children to ensure generational continuity and stability of political communications. The author supposes that the dominance of the research attitude towards the process of politicization of children as the implementation of the institutional and ideological activity of older generations concerning the age minority limits the ability to understand qualitative changes in contemporary communications. The blurring of boundaries between the “world of childhood” and “adults” in the contemporary society leads to the fact that relations between generations become more complicated and acquire a high degree of variability and arbitrariness. The diversification of symbolic production, the multiplication of actors in contemporary political communications, the growing variability of political ideologies and ways of representing politics, actualizes the study of the political socialization of children as a specific political communication depending on the features of the spatio-temporal design of political events in certain national communities. According to the author, this allows us to take into account the differences in the perception of the significance of certain political events by generations and the peculiarities of the children’s and youth’s positioning concerning the older generation. In this case, the meaning and content of political socialization is not reduced to the process of adaptation of children to the institutions and ideological regimes of “adult society”, but appears as a process of choosing and challenging the collectively significant symbols of the older generation by the younger generation. A decisive role in the study of the political socialization of children is played by the research of the influence of the dynamics of the profiles of the legitimation of national memory, including various competing symbolic representations of images of the past and the future, the typology of the heroic, ideas of guilt and responsibility. The author emphasizes the importance of description and applied analysis of the effectiveness of the symbolic structures of national memory and the role of iconic power in the implementation of politics of children on the example of the US and contemporary Russian cinema. Using the theoretical and practical explications of contemporary cultural sociology as a methodological basis, the author proposes a new approach to the study of the political socialization of children and the politics of children in contemporary society.