Hannah Arendt And Education

Hannah Arendt And Education: Renewing Our Common World is the first book to bring together a collection of essays on Hannah Arendt and education. The contributors contend that Arendt offers a unique perspective, one which enhances the liberal and critical traditions' call for transforming education so that it can foster the values of democratic citizenship and social justice. They focus on a wide array of Arendtian concepts?such as natality, action, freedom, public space, authority and judgment?which are particularly relevant for education in a democratic society. Teachers, educators, and citizens in general who are interested in democratic or civic education would benefit from reading this book.

This book gathers some of Hannah Arendt’s core themes and focuses them on the question, ‘What is education for?’ For Arendt, as for Aristotle, education is the means whereby we achieve personal autonomy through the exercise of independent judgement, attain adulthood through the recognition of others as equal but different, gain a sense of citizenship through the assumption of our civic rights and responsibilities, and realize our full potential as sentient beings with the capacity for human ‘flourishing’ and ‘happiness’ (eudaimonia). In order to appreciate the pivotal role that education plays in Arendt’s analysis of the human condition, we have to understand the emphasis she placed on ‘thoughtfulness’, as the measure of our humanity and on ‘thoughtlessness’, as the measure of our inhumanity. Education sustains and develops the human capacity: to think together (phronesis), to think for oneself (what Arendt called ‘the two-in-one’ of thinking), and to think from the point of view of others (what she termed ‘representative thinking’). From the developing constellation of ideas embedded in her vast and varied body of work, the author infers a notion of education as a necessary preparation for personal fulfillment, social engagement, and civic participation.

In her renowned and provocative essay, The Crisis in Education, Hannah Arendt observed that a 'crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgements, that is, with prejudices'. Taken as a whole, Arendt's work provides an enduring provocation to think and to make judgements about education and the issues that impact on it, such as political, economic and cultural disruption and uncertainty. Drawing together the leading thinkers on Arendtian ideas and education, this collection explores the role and promise education can have in preparing the future generation to understand, to think about and to act within the world. Concluding the same essay on the crisis in education, Arendt declared education to be the point at which love for the world meets love for those who are newcomers to it. The authors respond to Arendt's call for responsibility and authority in education, providing a leading edge thinking, analysis and agenda setting for public education systems and the world in dark times.

In her renowned and provocative essay, The Crisis in Education, Hannah Arendt observed that a 'crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgements, that is, with prejudices'. Taken as a whole, Arendt's work provides an enduring provocation to think and to make judgements about education and the issues that impact on it, such as political, economic and cultural disruption and uncertainty. Drawing together the leading thinkers on Arendtian ideas and education, this collection explores the role and promise education can have in preparing the future generation to understand, to think about and to act within the world. Concluding the same essay on the crisis in education, Arendt declared education to be the point at which love for the world meets love for those who are newcomers to it. The authors respond to Arendt's call for responsibility and authority in education, providing a leading edge thinking, analysis and agenda setting for public education systems and the world in dark times.

From the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism, “a book to think with through the political impasses and cultural confusions of our day” (Harper’s Magazine) Hannah Arendt’s insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital essence of these concepts and use them to regain a frame of reference for the future. To participate in these exercises is to associate, in action, with one of the most original and fruitful minds of the twentieth century.

Bearing with Strangers looks at inclusion in education in a new way, regarding education as a discipline with practical and theoretical concepts and criteria which emanate from education and schooling itself. By introducing the notion of the instrumental fallacy, it shows how this is not only an inherent feature of inclusive education policies, but also omnipresent in modern educational policy. It engages schooling through an Arendtian framework, constituted by and in a specific practice with the aim of mediating between generations. It outlines a didactic and pedagogical theory that presents inclusion not as an aim for education, but as a constitutive feature of the activity of schooling. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the book offers a novel and critical perspective on inclusive education, as well as a contribution to a growing literature re-engaging didactic and pedagogical conceptions of teaching and the role of the teacher. Schooling is understood as a process of opening the world to the young and of opening the world to the renewal that the new generations offer. The activity of schooling offers the possibility of becoming attentive toward what is common while learning to bear with that which is strange and those who are strangers. The book points to valuable metaphors and ideas – referred to in the book as ‘pearls’ – that speak to the heart of what schooling and teaching concerns. Bearing with Strangers will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, inclusive education and educational policy.

Rodowick takes after the theories of Hannah Arendt and argues that thinking is an art we practice with and for each other in our communities. In An Education in Judgment, philosopher D. N. Rodowick makes the definitive case for a philosophical humanistic education aimed at the cultivation of a life guided by both self-reflection and interpersonal exchange. Such a life is an education in judgment, the moral capacity to draw conclusions alone and with others, and letting one’s own judgments be answerable to the potentially contrasting judgments of others. Thinking, for Rodowick, is an art we practice with and learn from each other on a daily basis. In taking this approach, Rodowick follows the lead of Hannah Arendt, who made judgment the cornerstone of her conception of community. What is important for Rodowick, as for Arendt, is the cultivation of “free relations,” in which we allow our judgments to be affected and transformed by those of others, creating “an ever-widening fabric of intersubjective moral consideration.” That is a fragile fabric, certainly, but one that Rodowick argues is worth pursuing, caring for, and preserving. This original work thinks with and beyond Arendt about the importance of the humanities and what “the humanities” amounts to beyond the walls of the university.

Hannah Arendt And Education: Renewing Our Common World is the first book to bring together a collection of essays on Hannah Arendt and education. The contributors contend that Arendt offers a unique perspective, one which enhances the liberal and critical traditions' call for transforming education so that it can foster the values of democratic citizenship and social justice. They focus on a wide array of Arendtian concepts—such as natality, action, freedom, public space, authority and judgment—which are particularly relevant for education in a democratic society. Teachers, educators, and citizens in general who are interested in democratic or civic education would benefit from reading this book.