Is Political Education an Oxymoron? Hannah Arendt's Resistance to Public Spaces in Schools" raises a number of crucial questions about the significance of Arendt's conception of political action for education. It also raises important questions about the extent to which pedagogical environments can be considered to be public spaces in Arendt's understanding of the term. In this essay, I want to consider two of Schutz's worries about the educational dimensions of Arendt's theory of political action. His first concern has to do with Arendt's claim that our capacity for political action is rooted in "the conditions of human existence -life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth." 1 Because we are conditioned to act, it seems that action need not be "taught." Arendt's reflections on education in her essay "The Crisis in Education," seem to reinforce this idea when she warns against the conflation of educational spaces with political spaces. She goes so far as to object to the phrase "political education" because she regards the relationship between ruler and ruled that is proper to education as antithetical to the spirit of equality that defines the political realm properly conceived. Schutz rightly wonders how Arendt expects children to make the transition from being taught about the world to sharing responsibility for the world. This is his second worry. He proposes that Arendt's theory of political action is useful to education only to the extent that it acknowledges that participation in public life is a "learned practice." To say that a practice is learned is not, of course, to suggest that it need be formally taught, but Schutz does think that it is important for us to consider how political action is learned and to ask how it might be learned in school.
In "Education for Autonomy, Education for Culture," Dana Howard attempts to break the impasse between those who emphasize a cultural community's claim to the right to educate its young "for culture," and those who insist that an education "for autonomy" is the only way to foster the capacity for critical reflection on the life options available to those of us who live in liberal pluralist societies. Howard maintains that a comprehensive religious education such as that undertaken by ultraorthodox Jews in Israel is not necessarily at odds with the ideal of autonomy, provided that one redefine autonomy so as to do justice to what it means to live a life shaped by profound religious commitments.
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