Thinking with Arendt: Education and Temporality

2023

JPBLHE

In this paper, this theme of the open question is offered as a hermeneutical approach to problem-based learning. Most of the scientific literature on problem-based learning is in the realm of the behavioral-sciences. To the extent that the latter becomes the exclusive focus of research on problem-based learning, there is a risk of instrumentalization. The hermeneutical approach of this paper is meant to complement this field of research. The subjects of humanities research are not directly available to a humanities scholar, at least not in the way experimental subjects are to a natural scientist. This is Wilhelm Dilthey’s epoch-making understanding of the humanities in a nutshell. Philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, drawing on Dilthey, extends this insight to the historicity of human existence as such, summarizing the latter as an ‘open question’ that is always impressing itself upon us as human beings, but which at the same time cannot be answered definitively. It is through this process of asking and answering that we leave behind a history in the first place. I use these arguments to show that the theme of the open question yields a series of interconnected educational insights: notably the importance of subjectification, the social and historical context within which education necessarily takes place, and the construction of new knowledge and experience. These educational insights are rendered explicit and put into practice in problem-based learning. I hope in this way to develop a research perspective on problem-based learning as not only a set of behaviors, but as the scene of meaningful action.

Section: : Implications For the Theory And Practice Of Problem-based ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Education as an Open Question

2023

JPBLHE

“…Still, I believe the contemporary attempt to reinvigorate education with Arendt is very much in the spirit of her work in general, not only because of her emphasis on ‘the new’ but also because of her pearl‐diver metaphor and its importance for her educational thought. The pearl‐diver is a Shakespearean image (from The Tempest ) that Arendt uses to discuss Walter Benjamin's work (Arendt, 1970; see Baluch, 2020; Korsgaard, 2019). The point of the metaphor is that remnants of the past have been ‘sea‐changed’ into ‘pearls and corals’ that the pearl‐diver brings to the surface (Arendt, 1970, p. 206).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Journal of Philosophy of Education

2022

Arendt‐inspired philosophy of education has been a lively field of research in recent years. This research is mostly based on Arendt's essay ‘The Crisis in Education’. In the same historical context, Arendt wrote her initial essay on education, the controversial ‘Reflections on Llittle Rock’, and her political‐theoretical work The Human Condition. All three texts show Arendt's concern about the public realm and its capture by ‘society’, which she understands as discarding the distinction between private and public. This raises the question of where education should be located in Arendt's thought: in the private realm, in society or in the public realm? In her ‘Reflections’ Arendt places education in the societal realm, but this approach fails to convince. The answer consistent with Arendt's use of the category of the ‘in‐between’ in her educational thought is that it is in none of the above. Instead, education takes place in an ambiguous zone in between private and public, where both make their influence felt, but neither dominates the other. This has implications not only for how we should understand Arendt's educational philosophy but also for her notions of private and public spheres as well as for other political‐theoretical concepts in her work. This answers the question about the location of education in a second way: education in Arendt's thought is not simply derivativeof her political works but can itself serve as an interesting perspective from which to view her writings.

Ambiguous authority: Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s concept of authority in education

Educational Philosophy and Theory

Noordegraaf-Eelens

2021

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt's sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt's use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt's situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt's neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt's authority depends on a dichotomy between the private (education, the child) and the public sphere (politics, the adult). This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt's feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority inbetween private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future (time), world and earth (space), and the private and public sphere (relation). This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority.