- Abstract.
For Hannah Arendt, education is the pre-political process that has been in crisis since the serious misconception of authority. The use of authority in education in her account is relevant to the responsibility of each adult raising child, starting from his birth. She indicated that the child development sphere is a dichotomy sphere that coincides, the private and the public. Parents play a role in the private sphere, and educators take the public role. Those roles work together to introduce the children to the world, and for life continuity. To stop recurring the crisis Arendt suggested teaching how to think as a path to creating a new world.
- Introduction.
The concept of evil has been popular in Arendt’s political and ethical thought.[1] Arendt discussed evil as an innate human nature that must be tamed in society if we seek prosperity in humanity. She raised the question of perfecting humanity through the Socratic Method, by which she claimed that education and politics connect together in the public realm as a societal activity. She referred the crisis in education as a political problem of the first magnitude.[2] Furthermore she illustrated that education is one of the inalienable civic rights.[3] In this paper I will argue that Arendt gave us education pattern as a way of living, and thinking as a solution of education crisis.
The education process is the vital stem of growing; it is indispensable for life continuousness and the development of the children in every civilization. Arendt was influenced by Kant as he said “the human being is the only creature that must be educated”.[4] Education relies on two factors insofar as the process may come to either fruiting or degenerating: the children’s initiativeness of learning, and teachers’ qualifications.
Arendt emphasized that the crisis in education in the modern world resulted from losing the significance of education: an education without learning is empty, and therefore degenerates into moral-emotional rhetoric.[5] This unintentional emptiness of education is related to fundamental aspects:
- The bankruptcy of meeting points between the two worlds: grown-ups and children.
- The assumption of using the teachers’ authorities to compel students to learn by the same way they did.
- Substitution doing for learning: learning in the old sense forced the child to give up his innate playful needs, which are in the modern sciences discovered as the pragmatic applications of children thrive.
The authority in the widest sense -as Arendt demonstrated- is accepted as a natural necessity. It is required by natural needs, and the helplessness of the child. In the political aspect it is also accepted for the continuity of an established civilization.[6] Arendt assumed that the inception of this crisis is the misunderstanding of authority. Which involves causing influential crises in society such as in culture and education that reflect on the political activity.[7]
Arendt differentiated between two spheres for the children’s education process, the private sphere which is represented in the parenting role, and the public sphere that fulfills the private sphere’s role in educating and introducing the outside world to the new* by teachers. The two spheres as Arendt stated are entirely responsible for developing children, and where exactly she located the authentic crisis, as those roles owe profound authority in the whole process itself. Authority implicit responsibility insofar as they accept to perform their roles, as adults might refuse to assume responsibility for the world in which they have brought children. And Arendt was too decisive as she said: anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them.[8]
- The private sphere: parenting role.
The private sphere for Arendt means protection, as the child needs to be protected against the world, in this sense his safe place is in his family, whose adults daily return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls.[9] As it requires even them the courage to leave their own protective zone for the sake of labor, if this zone means protection for children from the world, it is also protective for adults from their concerns for life.
Arendt emphasized that “Natality is the essence of education”.[10] She believed that the responsibility of introducing the world to the young has twofold: parents and educators, as they work together for preparing children in advance for the task of renewing a common world.[11] And she chose to name the family “the private sphere” to assert the fundamental task of privacy in the protection of the child. However, she didn’t imagine how much this private sphere is penetrated by social media nowadays.
She indicated that children’s privacy promotes their growth, and the concealment of this privacy is attacking the function of the family to thrive. Furthermore, Arendt argued that losing the function of the private sphere is related to losing authority in all spheres. She referred to the meeting point between the two realms is: the child, who is a human being in the process of becoming in her sense. She said crucially the more radical the distrust of authority becomes in the public sphere, the greater probability that the private sphere will not remain inviolate.[12]
Moreover, her approach by this connection was to reflect on the role of authority that plays in education in every civilization, as the obligation of the children entails for every society. She was convinced by this idea of the private sphere as a minimizing instance of the political society, insofar as it reflects on the new generation’s conceptual resources of authority within freedom. In other words, the private sphere in Arendt’s account is the root of education for the child, as much as it has been protected it lives and emerges in the darkness and grows strong by its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light of the public sphere.
- The public sphere: educators role.
Education must create condition for what Arendt calls: “setting-right” of the world.[13] As it is not easy task for teachers to take responsibility for introducing students to the world “as it is” and not as we might wish it were.[14]
The authority of the educator acquires its power from his qualifications, insofar as he can simply master his subjects or not, as teaching is a matter of continual beginnings.[15] Authority here reveals the connection between the teacher and his qualifications. And the crisis in this sphere is: whoever takes the responsibility in teaching must be qualified enough for teaching, the child has the ability to understand clearly whether the teacher is sufficient to lead him or not, what destruct teacher’s authority is seeing him no longer affective. The teacher’s qualifications consist in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it. Although a measure of qualification is indispensable for authority, the highest possible qualification can never beget authority.[16] Arendt’s approach here is to raise the importance of educators’ qualifications and to demand pedagogical development.
According to Arendt the compulsion of authoritarian-teachers on students to abstain from looking up freely other resources than theirs is spontaneously killing creativity in them. Moreover, since the teachers in public schools rely on fixed curricula, they discard training, and consequently, it blocks the teacher from devoting himself to continuous learning. This, in turn, means by Arendt’s expression passing a dead knowledge.[17]
Also, Arendt saw that it is required to respect the past civilization as instance guiding example, however, she criticized the conservative learning mainstream for attempting of returning to the old prosperity existence[18], as she believed the crisis occurred in the modern world, one cannot simply go nor yet simply turn back. This reversal will acutely bring the same situation in which the crisis has arisen.[19]
Arendt encouraged to think not only as a way of dealing with the past but also, as a power of wrestling past faults entail. To think deeply Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, this way of thinking delves into the depth of the past, to revive it and contribute in renewing our world. She articulated this thinking of the past as “thought fragments”, as something rich and strange and perhaps even everlasting.[20] Arendt put thinking in a category higher than the laboring, however thinking process maybe less productive than laboring. She assumed that the thinking process leaves a trace and can never be materialized into any objects.[21]
In fact, she found Kant’s greatest contribution in philosophy since Socrates is his new dimension of thinking: he added to the Socratic postulate of inner consistency an enlarged mentality of putting oneself in other’s position.[22] For Arendt thinking is the path of preventing recurring last century’s uncountable human damages.
- Conclusion.
Arendt witnessed in her early life a dramatic life event, that shocked her magnitude in the intellectual community; so consequently, she kept all her effort theorizing beyond societal crises as a trial to destruct every previous judgment. She shed light on neglected corners of experiences by making new distinctions, And to keep the new children away from this decisive disaster.
Her arguments linked every aspect in social realm to the lack of authority as a rooted disorder in each realm. By Kant’s influence as he believed that education is the central attempt to overcome evil. For her, authority in education is assuming responsibility for this task. Arendt used education as a starting point for the political theory, since the new generation for today is the foreseeable politicians for tomorrow.
And she defined distinction between two boundaries around the child. In fact, the application of these boundaries is a society challenge, and her concern about private sphere requires us to pay attention for nowadays private turmoil. Thus, the misusing of social media can be society destruction.
Arendt attempted to alter the conservatism in education by rooting thinking as a promising assumption between respecting the past’s inherent, and accepting the ambiguousness of the future.
- References.
1. Farmosa, Paul(2008). The Problems with Evil. Contemporary Political Theory 7 (4).
2. Arendt, Hannah(1978) Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought.
3. Kant, I(2007). Lectures on Pedagogy (1803). In Anthropology, History, and Education. Cambridge University Press.
* She named children the new ascribed to the greek as they called young people the new ” το νέο “. cp. Arendt, H. the Crisis in Education, p 171.
4. Levinson, Natasha (2001). The Paradox of Natality: Teaching in the Midst of Belatedness. In Mordechai Gordon (ed.), Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing Our Common World. Westview Press, p 16.
5. Gordon, Mordechai (1999). Hannah Arendt on Authority: Conservatism in Education Reconsidered. Educational Theory 49 (2).
6. Arendt, H. (1968) Walter Benjamin, In: Men In Dark Times, Harcourt Brace Javanavicb, New York p.p 205, 206
7. Arendt, H. (1998) Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, P 75.
8. Sosnowska, Paulina (2019) Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger Philosophy, Modernity, and Education, Lexington Books.
[1] Farmosa, Paul(2008). The Problems with Evil. Contemporary Political Theory 7 (4), p 395.
[2] Arendt, Hannah(1978) “the Crisis in Education”, in: Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, p 169.
[3] Ibid, p 174.
[4] Kant, I(2007). Lectures on pedagogy (1803). In Anthropology, History, and Education. Cambridge University Press, p 437 (9: 441)
[5] Arendt, H. the Crisis in Education p 189.
[6] Arendt, H. What is Authority, in: Between Past and Future, p 100.
([7] (Arendt, H. Between Past and Future, p 99.
* She named children the new ascribed to the greek as they called young people the new ” το νέο “. cp. Arendt, H. the Crisis in Education, p 171.
[8] Ibid, P 183.
[9] Ibid, p 180.
[10] Ibid, p 170.
[11] Ibid, p 189.
[12] Arendt, H. the Crisis in Education, p 184.
[13] Ibid, p 192.
[14] Ibid, p 189.
[15] Levinson, Natasha (2001). The paradox of natality: Teaching in the midst of belatedness. In Mordechai Gordon (ed.), Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing Our Common World. Westview Press, p 16.
[16] Arendt, H. the Crisis in Education, p 183.
[17] Ibid, p 177.
[18] Gordon, Mordechai (1999). Hannah Arendt on authority: Conservatism in education reconsidered. Educational Theory 49 (2), p 171.
[19] Arendt, H. the Crisis in Education, p 188.
[20] Arendt, H. (1968) Walter Benjamin, In: Men In Dark Times, Harcourt Brace Javanavicb, New York p.p 205, 206
[21] Arendt, H. (1998) Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, P 75.
[22] Sosnowska, Paulina (2019) Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger “Philosophy, Modernity, and Education”, Lexington Books, p 200.
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