On Arendt's "The Crisis in Education"

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the German American philosopher of the twentieth century, has quietly, almost imperceptibly influenced my thinking on education. Many years ago I came across the following line which I have thought about deeply and frequently, always failing to explain it to myself and others, while also feeling moved by its immanent truth.

"Education is not just a matter of growing up, it is a matter of growing up in the world. Therefore, teachers and educators should represent the world."

I found the emphasis on "in the world" both obvious and mysterious. How else and where else do kids grow up? I will try to explore this more fully. This line comes from "The Crisis in Education" (1954). Arendt begins by a forceful axiom:

"The essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world."

To be clear, natality here does not mean the birthrate of a population. She is referring to the all too obvious fact of being born. The emphasis on "into the world" will come later. But the primordial fact of being born is itself the beginning of anything at all, that includes education. The whole enterprise of education rests on the premise that a new generation is arriving, and that new generation will have to be protected and made ready for the world that is coming into their hands.

"He who seriously wants to create a new political order through education, that is, neither through force and constraint nor through persuasion, must draw the dreadful Platonic conclusion: the banishment of all older people from the state that is to be founded.
For the phrase “New World” gains its meaning from the Old World."

A new world becomes new only when something is or is made old. This making of something old is oxymoronic, similar to creating future histories. The Platonic idea of banishing all older people for the new state does sound dreadful, indeed. Who else is going to gift the world to the new arrivals? And in the process of this assignation, the old generation is made old. It becomes old in the process of handing over, not unlike the wasp who dies in the ficus tree fruit without ever seeing the world outside.

"...nowhere else have the most modern theories in the realm of pedagogy been so uncritically and slavishly accepted. Thus, the crisis in American education, on the one hand, announces the bankruptcy of progressive education and, on the other, presents a problem of immense difficulty because it has arisen under the conditions and in response to the demands of a mass society."

All too frequently have the institutions of education, sometimes willingly and sometimes by policy, been subjected to the glimmer and the conceit of the "new" - teaching practices, technological tools, et al. The current AI hysteria is perhaps the apogee of institutional subjugation. The total myopia around new educational practices, sometimes fuelled by latest neuroimaging techniques and sometimes by plain old scientism, is novel only at first.

While it is enticing to embrace progressive for forceful naturality and obvious sensibility, one would do well to remember Theodore Brameld's words: "Progressivism is strong in scientific method: weak in concerns for the concrete and comprehensive outcome of that method. Strong in teaching as how to think, weak in teaching as what to think for. Strong in encouraging active intelligence; weak in estimating and counteracting those forces and restrictions as block its effective operation. Strong in encouraging individual self-expression and individual action; weak in integrating these successfully, powerfully with group self-expression and group action. String in tolerance towards varying beliefs; weak in conviction to needed positive beliefs...Strong in believing that present and important and real; weak in believing that the future is equally important and real. Strong in delineating the complexities and pluralities of experience; weak in fusing these into comprehensive, appealing, purposeful designs. In short progressivism is strong in all the ways liberalism is strong; weak in all ways liberalism is weak."

"Under the influence of modern psychology and the tenets of pragmatism, pedagogy has developed into a science of teaching in general in such a way as to be wholly emancipated from the actual material to be taught."

While I have learnt a lot from John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, and William James and other pragmatists, the declining value of actual domain knowledge in a teacher's toolbox is a trend I would stay guarded against. The extreme example of the detachment of pedagogical knowledge and domain knowledge is seen in approaches like constructivism (particularly the extreme variant of it, which emphasises on most work being done by students under minimal guidance and intervention).

Normally the child is first introduced to the world in school. Now school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all.The responsibility for the development of the child turns in a certain sense against the world: the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world. But the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation.

I could not have found a better formulation of what I believe a school or any educational institution must be. How often have we heard that schools are not representing the "real" world and the militant calls for introducing real world topics like financial literacy and such. It would be hard to quantify how much I detest this line of thinking. Schools are an abstraction of the world, there is no other way to introduce the world to a child. The school is perhaps the most important institution of the society because of the fact that it is here that the child first encounters the world that is not immediate to her. The zone of knowledge spreads out from the core of immediate personal and familial awareness to local and national communities, to places further away and eventually to the world of ideas of past and present. School is this liminal "in-between" space, wedged between the personal domain (consisting of family and immediate neighbourhood) and the limitless outer world. This realm of between is crushed daily by the forces on the outsides of either side - the family on one side and the professional, brutal world of the real on the side. This realm, hence, must become the refuge of protection from both. A place where the new generation first encounters the real world in a gentle, partially digested way and also re-evaluates the private domain that she has come from. The school becomes a cell wall, permeable but selectively. The wall allows certain beneficial elements of the world to enter, but not without changing them, morphing them in to something that makes the new generation want to belong to that wondrous but mechanical, and beautiful but brutal world.
One cannot ascribe all that is good to the new generation only. This new generation is full of possibilities, including that of the destructing the world that exists. So this realm of between is not only protect the new generation, it must also protect the world from it.