Abstract
Formal political education has developed distinct ideologies and practices congruent with political and educa tional development. It is the thesis of this essay that two models of official civic education, namely, the rational-activist and the integrative-consensual, have dominated teaching ma terials and concepts. Neither form retains the general sup port, the functionality, or the dominant educational institutions that did exist in an earlier historical period. Indeed, the tend ency for them to be absorbed by an emerging third model, namely, the segmented-organizational educational apparatus, is one of the major reasons for the frequency of "null" findings relating formal education to political participation and atti tude-formation.