Educational Thinking and the Conservation of the Revolutionary

Abstract

Background/Context Prior work on Hannah Arendt and education has focused on democratic education, multicultural education, and conservatism in education. Most of these studies have concentrated on her essay, “The Crisis in Education.” While this study extends that work, it does so by taking up the lesser studied but equally relevant piece, “Reflections on Little Rock.” Furthermore, sparse attention has been paid to Arendt's work on thinking in relation to work on education. This piece seeks to fill these gaps in the scholarship on Arendt and education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Following Arendt, my inquiry is concerned with what we might call “the life of the student mind.” Two central questions guide this inquiry: What are students qua students doing that prepares them in advance for renewing a common world? How, as students, are they engaged with the world without being asked to take responsibility for it? Research Design This study is a comparative exegesis of Arendt, reading her early essays, “Reflections on Little Rock” and “The Crisis in Education,” through the lens of Thinking, the first volume of her final and posthumously published work, The Life of the Mind. The study is heavily supported by research conducted in the Arendt digital archives. Conclusions/Recommendations This exegesis reveals new insights into Arendt's mapping of the educational sphere and the principal activity taking place therein, namely, educational thinking. The close comparative reading of Arendt's early and later work produces a philosophical construction of the educational sphere as a liminal zone between past and future, a gap between the private sphere of the home, and the political sphere of the public realm. In turn, the primary result of this study is the articulation of a distinctly Arendtian conception of educational thinking as occurring in an existential space of solitude where students, withdrawn from the continuity of everyday life, engage in an activity that enables them to reflect upon and critically reimagine the world and thereby prepare for world-caring.

Where is education? Arendt's educational philosophy in between private and public

“…In terms of the state of exception, this makes the relationship of the status necessitatis to both fact and law unintelligible. In terms of education, it is overly simplistic to see its relationship to private and public spheres in terms of a ‘gap’, as phrased by Eduardo Duarte in an important article, which also introduces the phrase ‘in‐between private and public’ (Duarte, 2010, pp. 491, 504).…”

“…A more substantial point is that the notion of thinking, when used in this way to shed light on education, does not clarify the relationship between education, on the one hand, and the ‘three realms’ of the private sphere, the public sphere and society, on the other hand. Thinking, as Duarte remarks, is ‘an activity that is always related to the world, yet not of the world’ (Duarte, 2010, p. 496), while also using the language of ‘withdrawal’ that is characteristic of thinking in Arendt's usage. My further question is how this being‐related to the world should be understood in education specifically.…”

“…My specific intention is to critically engage with Arendt's notions of private and public, which occupy a central role both in her educational and in her political work. While Arendt positions education in the third ‘realm of human life’, society, I argue that education should instead be thought as ‘in‐between private and public’ (Duarte, 2010, p. 491 1 ). Both private and public act on it with full force, yet without either dominating and claiming education for either the fully private or the fully public domain.…”

The Janus Face of Autism: As the “Between” in Arendt’s Conception of Thinking

“…6 For educators to ignore this space of positive independence is dangerous, as it can lead to nonthinking. To provide a counter-narrative to that of cooperative learning, Duarte posits the site for the spectator-as-student as a conservatory, schole, where "schole designates education as the time of detachment, I'm holding back from everyday life and from politics, that is, the deliberate abstention from the social and political spheres…" 7 It is clear from Duarte's discussion of the conservatory that solitude is fundamental to any Arendtian conceptualization of schooling, that is, if -and only if -one's conception of schooling views thinking as pertinent to its mission. The conceptual status of withdrawal itself, however, is not clear.…”