Hannah Arendt on the Relationship Between Education and Political Action

Abstract

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.

Is It Us or Them? Teacher Education as Act of Resistance to a Neo-liberal Age

“…The contrast between the placement environment and the educative environment provided by the university setting illustrates the potential for new contexts through meaning-making opportunities in a political world. The potential for ITE is to protect and ensure the conditions for the quality of human thinking and acting (Levinson, 2001) and thus provide scope within placement socialisation processes.…”