The Crisis
In "The Crisis in Education", Hannah Arendt identifies a crisis in the US school system. Her argument is not however, limited to the USA alone. She suggests that the USA, as the most advanced and modern in the world [in 1954, when she was writing], is simply the place where the education problems of a mass society have become most acute. This is, in part, she contends, because the USA has accepted progressive education theories so comprehensively and uncritically. Nevertheless, she contends, while this is true of the USA [in 1954], it may, in the foreseeable future, be equally true of almost any other [modern, Western] country [1].
For Arendt (1961: 195),
"The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition."Three Basic Assumptions
Arendt traces the measures which led to this state of affairs back to three basic assumptions.
The first assumption is that there is a child's world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and must be left to children themselves to govern, in as much as this is possible, with adults simply assisting with this government. In short, Arendt concludes, children have been banished from the world of grown-ups. Arendt suggests that this means that children are subjected to a tyranny of a (presumed consensual) majority [2]. Children react to this pressure, Arendt contends, either through conformity or juvenile delinquency, or a mixture of both.
The second basic assumption is that a teacher is a man or woman who can teach anything. His or her training is in teaching, not the mastery of any particular subject discipline. This has led, Arendt argues, to a serious neglect of the training of teachers in their own subjects. In this way, the most legitimate source of the teacher's authority, as the person who knows more than the students, is rendered ineffective. In consequence, Arendt proposes, the non-authoritarian teacher, who would like to abstain from all methods of compulsion because he can rely on his own authority, can no longer exist.
The third basic assumption is that you can know and understand only what you have done yourself. In education, this leads to a substitution of doing for learning, insofar as this is possible. The intention behind this substitution was not to teach knowledge but to inculcate a skill. The result was a transformation of institutions for learning into vocational institutions. It also leads to a substitution of lay for work, on the basis that play was considered the liveliest and most appropriate way for the child to behave in the world.
Arendt's Twofold Question
Arendt does not wish to engage in the debate over attempts to reform the US educational system, which are of purely American interest. Rather, what she considers important to the argument that she is developing is a twofold question.
The first part of the question, posed in a Heideggerian mode, relates to which aspects of the modern world and its crisis have revealed themselves in the educational crisis.
The second part of the question concerns what we can learn from this crisis for the "essence" of education by reflecting on the role that education plays in civilization, i.e. on the obligation that the existent of children entails for human society.
Arendt's Responses
In answering her own question, she begins by stating that a crisis in education would give rise to serious concern even if it did not reflect, as she thinks it does in this case, a more general crisis and instability in modern society. For Arendt, education is a central activity in human society. The child, more generally the subject of education, presents a double aspect to the educator. The subject is new in a world that is strange to her/him and s/he is in a process of becoming familiar with (or learning about) that world; and s/he is a new human being in the process of becoming a 'more' human being.
Arendt argues that this double aspect implies a double relationship: to the world, on the one hand; and to life, on the other hand. She continues: the child (the subject of education) shares the state of becoming with all living things, but the child is only new in relation to a world that was there before her/him, and which will continue after her/his death, in which s/he will spend her/his life. This second point, being new in relation to a world, is crucial for Arendt's argument:
"If the child were not a newcomer in this human world but simply a not yet finished living creature, education would be just a function of life and would need to consist in nothing save that concern for the sustenance of life and that training and practice in living that all animals assume in respect to their young." (Arendt, 1961: 185)The human child is not only summoned into life but is simultaneously introduced into a world. Human parents, as educators, assume responsibility for the life and development of the child and for the continuance of the world, two sets of responsibilities that do not coincide. They may, indeed, come into conflict with each other. The child requires protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to her/him from the world; but the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being destroyed by the onslaught of the new, undermining the sustenance it provides.
Protecting the child from the world requires the creation of a safe and secure place, whose privacy is maintained against the public aspect of the world. At this point, Arendt makes a crucial distinction. She argues that in the public world common to all, both persons and work count, but life, qua life, does not matter [3]. Furthermore, just as when the glare (uncaring, unflinching attention) of the public realm invades the private space (of the familial home), so that children no longer have a place of security where they can grow and develop, so too this same destruction of the living space occurs when the attempt is made to turn children into a kind of world of their own, as is the case in the first basic assumption outlined above.
Among those peer groups arises a public life of a sort in which children, as human beings in process of becoming but not yet complete, are forcibly exposed to the perception of an unremitting and uncaring public world. Thus, modern education, insofar as it attempts to establish an isolated world of children, destroys the conditions for vital development and growth.
The Crisis of Authority
This outcome, the infringement of the conditions for vital growth, is ironic because the aim of the pedagogical initiatives was to serve the child by doing away with the unsuitable methods of the past, freeing the child from the standards derived from the adult world.
School is the institution, Arendt proposes, that is interposed between the private domain of home and the world, in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible for the child (the educational subject).
Educators stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility, although they themselves did not make it. In education, this responsibility for the world takes the form of authority. Crucially, the authority of the educator and the qualifications of the teacher are not the same thing.
However, Arendt notes, in present day [i.e. 1954] public and political life, authority either plays no role at all or at most plays a highly contested role. Arendt argues that it is no accident that the place where political authority was first undermined, i.e. the USA, is the place where the modern crisis in education makes itself most keenly felt.
Arendt suggests that such a situation poses problems for educational activity in which conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence, and whose task is to cherish and protect the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, and the old against the new.
The real difficulty in modern education, for Arendt, lies in the fact that the minimum of conservation and the conserving attitude [caring attitude? AP], without which education is impossible, is extraordinarily hard to achieve. The crisis of authority in education is closely connected with the crisis of tradition, the crisis in our attitude to the past.
Education, by its very nature, cannot forego authority or tradition. Yet it must makes its way in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition. Recognising this situation, Arendt proposes that,
"We must decisively divorce the realm of education from the others, most of all from the realm of public, political life, in order to apply to it alone a concept of authority and an attitude toward the past which are appropriate to it but have no general validity and must not claim a general validity in the world of grown-ups." (Arendt, 1961: 195)The practical consequences of this are that, first, a clear understanding is needed that "the function of the school is to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living". (Arendt, 1961: 195) Second, the distinction between children and adults means that one cannot educate adults nor treat children as thought they were grown up. However, this dividing line must not be allowed to become a wall separating children from the adult community as though they were not living in the same world and as though childhood were an autonomous state.
Education, as distinguished from learning, Arendt states, must have a predictable end; and, furthermore, while one cannot educate without at the same time teaching, one can quite easily teach without educating. Equally, one can go on learning until the end of one's days without, for that reason alone, becoming educated.
The task remains, Arendt concludes, that of renewing a common world.
Notes
[1] In passing, Arendt compares the situation in the USA in the immediate post-1945 period with that obtaining in the UK, or, as she calls it, England. As a result of the Education Act 1944, or the Butler Act, secondary education was made available to all classes of the population. The school leaving age was raised to 15 years, while keeping age 11 as the point at which children passed from primary to secondary education.
The new secondary school system consisted of three types of school: grammar schools, secondary technical schools and secondary modern schools. While allowing for the creation of comprehensive schools, which would combine all three pathways, in the initial period only a few comprehensives were founded.
To decide which type of school any individual child should attend, all schoolchildren sat the 11+ exam, which, as Arendt notes, determined whether a child was on a path towards higher or tertiary education.
What the 11+ exam aimed at in the UK was a meritocracy. Arendt argues that this is once more the establishment of an oligarchy, based this time on talent rather than, as before, wealth or birth. This means that the UK will continue, as it has been since time immemorial, to be governed as an oligarchy or aristocracy, the latter if one takes the view that the most gifted are also the best, which, as Arendt comments, is by no means a certainty; or indeed, a "poshocracy", intermingling confusedly birth, wealth and talent. As an oligarchy, Arendt points out, the UK is neither a monarchy nor a democracy.
The rigour of the 11+ exam has been disputed since its inception but, as Arendt notes, it would have been impossible in the USA as it offends against the US concept of equality in which a right to education is seen as one of the inalienable civic or civil rights. The almost physical division of children into gifted and ungifted would have been considered intolerable in the USA. Meritocracy, as a variety of oligarchy, contradicts the principle of an egalitarian democracy.
[Questions: To argue thus, that such a division would have been considered intolerable in the USA, would Arendt not have to accept that the US principle of "separate but equal" sustains equality in racial terms, and that US public school segregation was not discrimination, based on physical separation, leading to a de facto inequality?[2] An insight into the way in which this tyranny through presumed consensus might operate in practice can be gained from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (2003) analysis of the performative utterance "I dare you" in her essay "Around the Performative", discussed in "Periperformatives and Environments".
Was not (and is not) class (in)equality the blind spot in UK education and society, just as racial (in)equality was (and is) the blind spot in US education and society?]
[3]The distinction which Arendt is making between life and world is elaborated further in her discussion in The Human Condition of the vita activa, a term she uses to designate three fundamental human activities, labour, work and action, which characterise three fundamental aspects of the human condition.
Thus, in "The Crisis in Education", Arendt suggests that what counts in the world is work and relations among persons ('action') but not labour, defined as "the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body" (Arendt, 1958: 7). For Arendt, "[t]he human condition of labor is life itself", whereas "[w]ork is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence", which "provides an "artificial" world of "things" such that "[t]he human condition of work is worldliness" (Arendt, 1958: 7).
Arendt argues that action is "the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter" (Arendt, 1958: 7). Thus, action "corresponds to the human condition of plurality" (Arendt, 1958: 7); and it is this plurality which is the indispensible condition of all political life and the condition through which all political life takes place.
From the perspective of 2014, sixty years after the publication of Arendt's text, it is more difficult to argue that action takes place directly between men and women without the intermediary of things or matter. This is partly because language itself, as speech, writing and media-tion, are now considered as material forms, albeit a less tangible and fungible materiality than "things". It is also partly because language is now seen to penetrate the material domains of things and material, architectural and geographical environments. Action, it might be argued, is mediated in multiple ways, and is never direct or without intermediary.
Again from the perspective of 2014, it would be difficult to hold that the three conditions of humanity, labour, work and action, are separate from one another. Rather, they would now be seen as interwoven or inter-related, as achieved through one another, even though Arendt's principle of conditionality would be wholeheartedly accepted. To some extent, this is anticipated by Arendt herself when she argues that,
"Men [and women, AP] are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men [and women, AP] nevertheless constantly condition their human makers… Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence." (Arendt, 1958: 9)This characterisation of reflexive conditionality opens the way to considering labour, work and action as interwoven through the body and its performative capabilities, as techniques of the body (Mauss, 1992; Pirani, 2005), in the realms of the intersubjective, the intercorporeal and the imaginary.
References
Arendt, H., 1961. The Crisis in education, in Between past and future: six exercises in political thought, pp.173-196. New York, NY: Viking Press.