It can be inferred from the passage that the author would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements about schools? (A) They should present political information according to carefully planned, schematic arrangements.
(B) They themselves constitute part of a general sociopolitical system that adolescents are learning to understand.
(C) If they were to introduce political subject matter in the primary grades, students would understand current political realities at an earlier age.
(D) They are ineffectual to the degree that they disregard adolescents’ political naiveté.
(E) Because they are subsidiary to government their contribution to the political understanding of adolescent must be limited.

Correct

(A) They should present political information according to carefully planned, schematic arrangements.

Explanation:

The passage from which the question came from:

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 adolescents 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 naivete that characterizes the younger adolescent's grasp of politics stems not from an ignorance of "fact" but from an incomplete comprehension of the common 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

the earth’s crust is broken into separate pieces called tectonic plates (fig. 7.14). recall that the crust is the solid, rocky, outer shell of the planet. it is composed of two distinctly different types of material: the less-dense continental crust and the more-dense oceanic crust. both types of crust rest atop solid, upper mantle material. the upper mantle, in turn, floats on a denser layer of lower mantle that is much like thick molten tar.

each tectonic plate is free-floating and can move independently. earthquakes and volcanoes are the direct result of the movement of tectonic plates at fault lines. the term fault is used to describe the boundary between tectonic plates. most of the earthquakes and volcanoes around the pacific ocean basin—a pattern known as the “ring of fire”—are due to the movement of tectonic plates in this region. other observable results of short-term plate movement include the gradual widening of the great rift lakes in eastern africa and the rising of the himalayan mountain range. the motion of plates can be described in four general patterns:

collision: when two continental plates are shoved together

subduction: when one plate plunges beneath another (fig. 7.15)

spreading: when two plates are pushed apart (fig. 7.15)

transform faulting: when two plates slide past each other (fig. 7.15)