Power and Education

Contexts of Oppression and Opportunity

Antonia Kupfer, Antonia Kupfer, Antonia Kupfer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137415356
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Education is a crucial influence early in life and is therefore inextricably linked with power. This book examines how education can limit opportunities and create social inequality as well as being an empowering force for good. Theoretical approaches on the relationship of power and education are discussed as are questions on power and knowledge.

Part I

Theories

1

Arendt, Power and Education

Wayne Veck

Introduction

In an interview with the novelist, Gunter Grass, in 1964, Hannah Arendt responded to a question prompting her recollections of being a child in a Jewish family in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century with the following words:

You see, all Jewish children encountered anti-Semitism. And the souls of many children were poisoned by it. The difference with me lay in the fact that my mother always insisted that I not humble myself. One must defend oneself! When my teachers made anti-Semitic remarks – usually they were not directed at me but at my other classmates, particularly at the Eastern Jewessess – I was instructed to stand up immediately, to leave the class, go home, and leave the rest to school protocol. My mother would have written one of her many letters, and, with that, my involvement in the matter ended completely. I had a day off from school, and that was, of course, very nice. But if the remarks came at me from other children, I was not allowed to go home and tell. That did not count. One had to defend oneself against remarks from other children. (Original emphasis, Arendt cited in Young-Bruehl, 2004, pp. 11–12)

How might we begin to think about a school where hostility and cruelty are not only exchanged between the young but are given a voice by adults as they address children? What sort of questions might we venture to ask about these anti-Semitic teachers, the school they taught in and the society they lived in? We could immediately ask questions about how power operated in and upon this school.

It is possible to think of schools as sites where we cannot avoid observing power at work (see, for example, Giroux, 1992; and Apple, 1993), as fields where force or violence (symbolic or otherwise) are present and where social and actual capital are reproduced (see Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Thomson & Holdsworth, 2003; Gibbs & Garnett, 2007; Mills, 2008; Azaola, 2012), and as organisations where identities are governed, created and conducted in and through disciplinary practices (see Foucault, 1977; 1982; 2003). But this chapter attempts to advance an account of the relation between power and education that is quite distinct from those accounts offered by critical theorists, Bourdieu, Foucault and the multitude of educationalists they have influenced. Indeed, this account rejects entirely the idea that what Arendt experienced as a young student might in any way be illuminated by thinking of the school as either an object or a site of power. Divided into three sections, the chapter considers Arendt’s insights into education, power and political life to distinguish the many ways educational practices descend into forms of violence from the kind of education that might prepare young people for what Arendt (1998, p. 241) names ‘the potentialities of human power’. The first section engages with this distinction between power and violence in relation to Arendt’s (1993a) concept of natality, the fact that each child by virtue of being born has the potential to sustain and renew a world that is already established. In the second section, Arendt’s view of authority in education is examined in relation to violence and power. The final section considers the connections Arendt illuminates between power, plurality and consent, to advance a view of education as a site where young people are prepared to act with others and thus to actualise power in a plural world.

Power, violence and natality

The English political theorist, Thomas Hobbes, famously contended that ‘during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre as is of every man against every man’(1985, p. 185). In this condition, Hobbes (1985, p. 189) insisted, each individual will ‘use his own power, as he will himself for the preservation of his own Nature’. Two aspects of power are assumed here. First, there is the idea that power can be amassed, owned and used by rulers to subdue their subjects. Second, power is presented as a resource that individuals can call upon whenever they are in peril. The concept of power advanced by Arendt suggests that Hobbes was wrong on both accounts. In the first, he has failed to distinguish power from violence and in the second, power from individual strength. So while Hobbes’s account of sovereign rule and its degradation into a war of all against all might have much to tell us about how violence acts on and through individuals, it can, from Arendt’s perspective, tell us nothing whatsoever about power.

Let us consider Arendt’s distinctions in detail. First and foremost, power, unlike violence, which always relies on tools and implements to undo what has been established, and unlike ‘strength, which is the gift and the possession of every man in his isolation against all other men’ (Arendt, 2006a, p. 166), depends only upon the existence of plurality of men and women. Indeed, Arendt (1998, p. 200) insists that power ‘exists only in its actualization’ and that it is actualised only where men and women act and speak to each other and witness words and deeds, only, that is, in the public realm (Arendt, 1969; 1970). In fact, it is Arendt’s view that power not only arises in the public realm but serves also to generate and sustain it (Allen, 2002; Gordon, 2001; Parekh, 1981; Penta, 1996). This is significant, for where violence effectively destroys, power is essentially creative (Arendt, 1946; 1969; 1970; 2006a). Arendt evokes the image of a table to illustrate the plurality that characterises the public realm or the polis, which ‘is not the city-state in its physical location’ but is rather ‘the organisation of people as it arises out of acting and speaking, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 198). The table is an equally apt image for Arendt’s concept of power. As people gathered around a table share a space with others but retain a distinct place within it, so in the polis persons are united by a power that ‘relates and separates men at the same time’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 52). Wherever ‘people are with others and neither for nor against them – that is, in sheer human togetherness’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 180), it is power that sustains the distance between them and it is power, at the same time, that ensures they act together in and for a ‘common world’ (Arendt, 1993a; 1998). When we are for ourselves and for those people we identify as being of our kind and against those we designate Other, our relationship to our fellows is characterised by force or violence. When we are with others, in the absence of all fear of falling behind and all zeal for getting ahead of them, power, in Arendt’s (1970, p. 52) phrase ‘springs up’.

It is precisely because she conceived the public realm as the space where persons are ‘oriented to reaching agreement and not primary to their respective individual successes’, that Habermas (1977, p. 6) is able to write:

Hannah Arendt disconnects the concept of power from the teleological model; power is built up in communicative action; it is a collective effect of speech in which reaching agreement is an end in itself for all those involved.

But if power is its own end, education, for Arendt (1993a), is teleological. Education aims at preparing the young for their contribution to the renewal of the world that is common to all. Immediately, this significant distinction requires us to think carefully about how schools, far from being sites where power relations play out, might prepare the young for participating with others in power. One way of making sense of this idea of the school as a place of preparation for power is offered by Arendt in the form of her concept of natality.

Arendt locates education between two births. Beyond our initial, natural birth there is our first contribution to the world we share with others, a contribution that is, in Arendt’s (1998, p. 176) words, ‘like a second birth’. Poised between these two births, the young turn restlessly to the adults before them, since, like ‘everything that is alive’, they have ‘an urge to appear’ (original emphasis, Arendt, 1971a, p. 29). However, it is the educator’s role, in Arendt’s (1993a) view, to form a bridge that simultaneously guides young persons to and distances them from that realm of appearances itself, that is, for Arendt, the common world. An education that guides young people from their first birth to their appearance in the public realm is one that prepares them, at the same time, for action and for spectatorship, for the announcement of their newness and for witnessing the newness of others. Thus Arendt (original emphasis, 1993a, p. 174) insists that ‘the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world’.

In his discussion of Arendt’s concept, Brunkhorst (2000, p. 188) notes that ‘natality implies both activity and passivity: we can never choose the time, the place, or the circumstances of our birth and life; nevertheless, we must make our own decisions and lead our own lives’. Levinson (2001) speaks of a ‘paradox of natality’ that arises from both the active and the passive dimensions of natality. If we respond to the newness that each young person represents by guiding them with force towards a predetermined place in the world, we thereby ‘strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us’ (Arendt, 1993a, p. 196). If we respond to this same newness with passivity and simply ‘expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices’ (Arendt, 1993a, p. 196), the danger is that young people, unprepared for action, will merely attempt to force their way into the world. Too active a response to the passive dimension of natality threatens to overwhelm young people with what already exists in the world, too passive a response to its active dimension risks allowing the young to overwhelm what has been established. The answer Arendt gives to this paradox and to the dilemma that it creates comes in the form of authority.

Authority and education

Arendt (1993a), in an essay that was first published in 1958, insists that education has fallen into a ‘crisis’. Arendt located, at the roots of this crisis, which, she maintained, had reached its most critical stage in America, the emergence of a mass society and the accompanying collapse of the public and the private realms into one another. This state of affairs, she contends, has seen the majority of adults simply give up their role in sustaining and protecting the world that is common to them all. Disconnected from the public and from their responsibility for its existence and survival, absorbed in pursing individual interests and pursuits, it is Arendt’s contention that adults no longer meet young people as persons of authority. ‘Authority has been discarded by the adults,’ Arendt (1993, p. 190) reflects, ‘and this can mean only one thing: that the adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they have brought the children’.

Whenever what ‘has always been accepted as a natural necessity’ (Arendt, 1993b, p. 92), the authority of adults in education, is relinquished, two possibilities emerge. First, the responses of adults to the active dimension of natality, to the young person’s urge to appear, can become passive and thus ineffectual. Second, responses to the passive dimension of natality, to the young person’s need to be protected from and guided to the world, can take the form of violence as adults simply demand that young people listen to and respect them. Let’s now address each of these possibilities in turn.

Arendt, who declares that it is ‘the essence of ... educational activity ... to cherish and protect ... the child against the world’ (Arendt, 1993a, p. 192), is equally adamant that ‘the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that burst upon it with each new generation’ (emphasis added, Arendt, 1993a, p. 186). If we give up on the idea of education as a preparation for power and, instead, conceive of the school as site of power, where young and old alike are all equally political actors, we risk ushering into the world not a powerful but rather a forceful generation. To understand Arendt’s insistence on this point is to grasp the significance she places on spectatorship in the life of the polis. Arendt maintains: ‘Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator’ (emphasis in the original, 1971a, p. 19). This means that action and the political freedom it announces is always reliant upon and always conditioned by spectators and their capacity to receive others in and through their actions. Where there are no spectators, where actions are neither witnessed nor recorded and words neither heard nor acted upon, no actor and no speaker can appear as a distinct person with a unique contribution to make to the world. Hence, a generation that believes its place in the public is assured merely by what it does and not at all by how it receives, registers and responds to the actions of others is a generation that contradicts its own urge to appear.

However, it is hardly likely that educators will be able to meet the child’s potentially disruptive insistence on appearing in the world too early until they have tempered their own urge to act and to be, at all times, political actors. Arendt notes that ‘where force is used, authority itself has failed’ (Arendt, 2006b, p. 93), and we might further observe that where authority fails to emerge, force is a persistent possibility. In relation to education, the crucial point is that force and violence can enter into schools to fill the void created when responsibility and authority absent them. So, while the indifference of adults to the world does not inflict a direct violence upon young people, it nevertheless opens a door through which violence might creep into education, a door that responsibility and authority would have locked closed. Consider, for example, the ‘personal authority’ that exists ‘between teacher and pupil’, which is secured and maintained by ‘neither coercion nor persuasion’, since:

To remain in authority requires respect for the person or the office. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt and the surest way to undermine it is laughter. (Arendt, 1970, p. 45)

There is no surer way for a teacher to induce dismissive laughter in the young than by attempting to persuade them of their authority, and no quicker way of diminishing respect to mere obedience than by attempting to coerce young people to learn. ‘Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings’, Arendt (1993a, p. 192, emphasis added) writes, before adding crucially: ‘but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look’.

Plurality, trust and power

Any education that prepares young people for either the violent assertion of their will over others or compliance, ill serves them for a life of participating i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Theories
• Part II  Knowledge
• Part III  Social Inequality
• Part IV  Empowerment
• Index