LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF YOUNG PEOPLE AS A PREREQUISITE OF SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT

The paper aims to study senior school students' legal consciousness in terms of social environment. The following factors of legal consciousness have been distinguished: legal literacy of students, mature civil qualities, the extent of their legal responsibility. The experiment was conducted in three stages. At the first stage, a comparative experiment was car- ried out in order to identify the level of legal literacy of students at a general educational institution and an out-of-school institution “Young Civil Society Leaders School”. At the second stage, a comparative analysis was carried out on as- sessing the level of maturity of students' civic qualities: democracy, social initiative, humanism, ethnicity, patriotism, pub- lic consciousness, national dignity, devotion to the Ukrainian state creation, state optimism, and political will. At the third stage, the degree of legal responsibility of students was studied. The most important role in the development of legal con- sciousness of the younger generation must be played by an updated and rationally constructed system of moral, labor and intellectual education able to ensure the formation of their active life-affirming mentality and the transformation of the culture of legal behavior into an inalienable quality of an individual. According to the research results, there is a necessity to update the content of school curriculum aimed at forming the legal education of students