Hannah Arendt on Educational Thinking and Practice in Dark Times

Education for a World in Crisis

Wayne Veck, Helen M. Gunter, Wayne Veck, Helen M. Gunter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350069183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In her renowned and provocative essay, The Crisis in Education, Hannah Arendt observed that a 'crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgements, that is, with prejudices'. Taken as a whole, Arendt's work provides an enduring provocation to think and to make judgements about education and the issues that impact on it, such as political, economic and cultural disruption and uncertainty. Drawing together the leading thinkers on Arendtian ideas and education, this collection explores the role and promise education can have in preparing the future generation to understand, to think about and to act within the world. Concluding the same essay on the crisis in education, Arendt declared education to be the point at which love for the world meets love for those who are newcomers to it. The authors respond to Arendt's call for responsibility and authority in education, providing a leading edge thinking, analysis and agenda setting for public education systems and the world in dark times.

Part One

The Promise of Education

1

Public Education: The Challenge of Educational Authority in a World without Authority

Roger Berkowitz

Introduction

In his memoir The Hunger of Memory: The education of Richard Rodriguez, Richard Rodriguez imagines public education as a path from the privation of family life to the fullness of public citizenship. Rodriguez grew up in a Spanish-speaking household in Sacramento, California. He was acutely aware of the chasm between his Spanish-speaking private home world and the public world beyond. His parents were uneasy speaking English in public, but comfortable at home where Spanish flowed easily. English was the language of strangers, distant and dangerous; his native Spanish was the tongue of safety and security. School was terrifying, partly because it demanded a new language and, also, because it meant learning to navigate a foreign world.

Public school was also a revelation, an opening of transformative possibilities. At school, Rodriguez learned that he had ‘the right – and the obligation – to speak the public language of los gringos’ (Rodriguez, 1983: 19). For Rodriguez, education ‘concerns my movement away from the company of family and into the city. This was my coming of age: I became a man by becoming a public man’ (7). He argues that education is ‘a long, unglamorous, even demeaning process – a nurturing never natural to the person one was before one entered a classroom’ (68). It is in school that he first ‘came to believe … [he] was an American citizen’ (22). As a result of his introduction into the requirements of public life, Rodriguez learned what he believes is the ‘the great lesson of school, that I had a public identity’ (19).

Education, Rodriguez understands, is learning to be a public person. Part of this journey is linguistic, which is why Rodriguez reminds us that early schooling used to be called grammar school. In learning grammar, students learned the weave and web of navigating life in public. As Rodriguez argued in a talk given at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College:

That’s what we used to call those first few years of schooling: grammar school. We used to talk in America about public schools, but it turns out that a lot of public schools are not so public anymore, that a lot of students don’t even have a sense of the public. They might have a sense of their tribe or their ‘hood’ but barely a sense of themselves among strangers. And we have told them that they have been to public schools, when in truth they haven’t. (Rodriguez, 2013)

In arguing that education is about leading young people into a public world, The Hunger of Memory is a political book. Students must learn English not because of its superiority, but because it is the ticket of admission to the public world of citizenship. Even more than math and science, learning the public language guides young people into a public world, which enables them to transition from private to public life, from wardship to citizenship.

Rodriguez’s argument that school prepares students to be citizens in a public world evokes Hannah Arendt’s own thinking about education in her essay ‘The Crisis in Education’. Arendt approaches the crisis in education as an opportunity to explore the essence of education. ‘The essence of Education’, Arendt argues, ‘is natality, the fact that human beings are born into a world’ (BF: 171). Education, from its Latin root educo (to lead forth), is the activity of leading young persons into the world, a world that already exists and into which they are inserted first by birth and second by education.

In Arendt’s original German version of her essay, the word she uses for education is Erziehung (DKE). Formed from an intensification of the verb ziehen, to pull, education is imagined to be a pulling of the student into the public world. It is easy to think of education as simply teaching skills or knowledge; but in its root sense, education is an introduction into a shared way of life. For Arendt, as for Rodriguez, education must presume the existence of a public world that has some authority, a world to which the student must be led into. Education presumes that adults and teachers take responsibility for teaching young people how to grow up in the always-already-existing world. It is this preparation to enter the public world that enables the transformation of private persons into public citizens.

When Arendt speaks of ‘the crisis of education’, she means above all that educators refuse their responsibility to introduce students to the world as it is. The refusal of responsibility is a consequence of the loss of authority. And the loss of authority, she argues, means that ‘the claims of the world and the requirements of order in it are being consciously or unconsciously repudiated; all responsibility for the world is being rejected, the responsibility for giving orders no less than for obeying them’ (BF: 186–187). Having succumbed to a more general crisis of authority, teachers and parents today share a distrust of the world, a feeling that the world is comprised of prejudices and injustices that undermine its authority. They have, she writes, ‘lost the answers on which we ordinarily rely without even realizing they were originally answers to questions’ (BF: 171). Without confidence in those answers, we end up refusing to recognize the world as meaningful. When adults don’t believe in our world, they find it is nearly impossible to lead young people into a meaningless world.

There is a Heideggerian echo in Arendt’s understanding of education. Newcomers are thrown into an always-already-existing world where we have to ‘find’ ourselves. For Heidegger, being thrown into the world opens a question of one’s essence (Wesen), the way one ‘ex-ists’ or stands-out in the world (Heidegger, 1993: 42).

For Arendt, however, the fact that the world into which children are introduced is ‘a pre-existing world, constructed by the living and the dead’, leads instead to two political questions (BF:174). First: How should a young person be taught and assimilated into the world as it already exists? This may be said to reflect Arendt’s conservatism, that the world as it is must be preserved. And second: How can children begin to change the existing world into which they are born? Here Arendt expresses her revolutionary sympathies that the world is always subject to transformation by free and spontaneous newcomers. Together, these questions comprise what Arendt calls the ‘double aspect’ of education (BF: 184).

This essay argues that Arendt’s understanding of education is simultaneously conservative and revolutionary. In Part One on the ‘Double Aspect’ of education, I explore this double aspect of education and show how Arendt reconciles conservation and revolution in the educational activity. In the se cond section on the ‘crisis of authority’, I argue that in the name of conserving the world against the onslaught of the young, Arendt insists that educators – in contrast to political actors – resist the crisis of authority, which is a disaster for education and threatens the ruin of the public world. Finally, the concluding section on the ‘Revolutionary Child and the Private Realm’ ties the revolutionary potential of education to its guarding of the private sphere of plurality. Throughout, I argue that Arendt shows that the revolutionary work of educating students comes not from educators, but from the students themselves. To prepare students to change the world, which is the highest aim of education, the educator must take the responsibility for the authority of the world and teaching the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. We educators must have faith in our students and leave the work of revolution to them.

Education’s Double Aspect

In its ‘double aspect’, education is paradoxically both conservative and revolutionary. In its first aspect, education is conservative in the cultural sense of cultivating the past and honouring the traditions that give the existing public world gravitas and authority. The world is that which was there before the child was born and which will continue to exist after the child dies. It is the common world of things, stories and experiences in which all of us spend our lives.

All children are newcomers who are born into a world that is at first strange to them. The child confronts the world that they see as a strange and often unjust authority. The world as the locus of tradition, culture and authority, ‘needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation’ (BF: 182). Without education, the child is like a rebel whose newness threatens to upend the world that is, for the child, strange and oppressive. Thus, children must be taught to speak a common language, respect common values, see the same facts and hear the same stories. The world is a reality that young people must be taught to recognize as their own.

The reality of the existing world is grounded in a tradition, a culture. As Arendt identifies in her essay ‘The Crisis in Culture’, the word ‘culture’ comes from the Latin colere, which means ‘to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve – and it relates primarily to the intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation’ (BF: 208). Mankind cultivates the world so fully that their artificial dwellings come to be his natural mode of being, literally and metaphorically speaking. Culture, in other words, names the humanly built world in which human beings live.

The cultured world is a world of art and architecture, but also of laws and states. Arendt adds that culture means ‘the mode of intercourse of man with the things of the world’. and she explains that ‘it is the polis, the realm of politics, which sets limits to the love of wisdom and of beauty’ (BF: 210). A culture both gives rise to a polis and is limited by the polis, whose institutions set the limits for aesthetic and political judgements. The common element connecting art and politics, Arendt writes, ‘is that they are both phenomena of the public world’. As such, both are mediated by ‘a mind so trained and cultivated that it can be trusted to tend and take care of a world of appearances whose criterion is beauty’ (BF: 215). Only educated persons, those trusted by the world because they are trained, are capable of political as well as aesthetic judgement.

To say that education must teach the young to reconcile themselves to the world is neither to say that the world is one of justice nor to say that it should not be changed. Rather, it is to accept that before one changes the world, one must understand and respect that world. The world we share is true neither in the sense that it is rational nor in being objectively verifiable. The common world is a fact of our lives only because it has come to be understood over time and through generations as the world we share. It is this shared and common world that educators teach the youth. The world we teach comprises the factual reality that surrounds us. Arendt calls this world the ‘truth … we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us’ (BF: 259).

Undoubtedly the existing common world is imperfect and subject to criticism. The world is comprised of prejudgements which harden into prejudices, some of which are harmful. And while Arendt argues that educators must teach the world as it is, this does not mean that young people cannot rebel and seek to transform the world. Arendt calls the effort to change the world the activity of politics. (PP: 99). But she argues that in the political engagement to change the world, we must begin from shared premises of a common world. Only if they know and respect the world as it is, will those who wish to change it be able to persuade others. Revolutionary change cannot happen if there is not a shared world that can be changed. Education has the responsibility of cultivating and leading young persons into the common world.

In its second aspect, education is revolutionary insofar as education must prepare the student to change and even revolutionize the world. The young are ‘newcomers’ who are not yet mature citizens. The child ‘shares the state of becoming with all living things; in respect to life and its development, the child is a human being in the process of becoming, just as a kitten is a cat in the process of becoming’ (BF: 182). These young people are humans in development; they are in danger of being assimilated by the world, of having their newness and spontaneity overwhelmed by the power of what is and what has been. Education must, Arendt argues, afford the child ‘special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world’ (BF: 182). The teacher is charged with nurturing the independence and newness of each child, what ‘we generally call the free development of characteristic qualities and talents … the uniqueness that distinguishes every human being from every other’ (BF: 185). Education thus provides a secure space for the child to thrive in his and her transformative uniqueness.

If education is to preserve the revolutionary capacity of young people, it must guard their newness. Man, as Augustine understood, is a beginner, and ‘to be free and to begin’ are intimately connected: ‘Man is free because he is a beginning and was so created after the universe had already come into existence’ (BF: 164–166). Children are miracles insofar as they can interrupt automatic processes and revolutionize the world with new beginnings. It is such children who ‘because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own’ (BF: 169). Educators must protect this faculty of beginning, of starting things anew, of bringing miracles to be within the context of an old world that is always superannuated and close to destruction from the standpoint of the next generation (BF: 189).

This double aspect of the relation between child and world means that education is both conservative and revolutionary. It is conservative because education conserves the common world against the rebelliousness of the new. But education is revolutionary insofar as it prepares the way for young people to become self-thinking citizens who will judge and act to make the world as they want it to be.

If teachers are to protect the revolutionary newness of each young student, teachers must not simply love the world, but as part of the world in which we live, must also love the fact – and it is a fact – that the world will change and be transformed by new ideas and new people. ‘It is in the nature of the human condition’, Arendt writes, ‘that each new generation grows into an old world, so that to prepare a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike from the newcomers’ hands their own chance at the new’ (BF: 174). Educators must love this transformative and revolutionary nature of children, and we must ‘love our children enough’ so that we do not strike from our children their birthright, to build a new world. Education is, in this aspect, revolutionary; it prepares students to strike out and create something altogether new.

The conservative and revolutionary aspects of education reflect two of Arendt’s long-standing concerns: the important yet problematic place of authority in the modern world, and the need for privacy as a space for thinking and for the guarding of individual spontaneity and freedom. The following two sections deepen the understanding of Arendt’s conservative and revolutionary approach to education. First, I argue that Arendt’s conservative approach to education demands an artificial determination that educators assert a claim of authority that no longer exists. Second, I argue that the need for education to remain revolutionary lies behind Arendt’s vibrant and highly controversial defence of education as part of the private realm. Each of these claims is highly controversial; and yet, they gird Arendt’s argument that education demands reconciliation with both worldly authority and revolutionary change.

Education and the Crisis of Authority

The crisis of education, Arendt writes in the first sentence of her essay, is one aspect of the larger crisis, a ‘general crisis that has overtaken the modern world’ (BF: 170). The general crisis for which the educational crisis is a manifestation is the crisis of authority.

Arendt inquire...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Author Biographies
• A Note on Referencing Arendt’s Publications
• Introduction: Hannah Arendt and the Promise of Education in Dark Times
• Part I The Promise of Education
• Part II Education and Crisis
• Part III Education for Love of the World
• Conclusion: The Promise of Education Revisited
• References
• Index
• Copyright