A “More General Crisis”: Hannah Arendt,World-Alienation,and the Challenges of Teaching for the World As It Is

Abstract

Background/Context

This article is part of a special issue on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Hannah Arendt's essay, “The Crisis in Education” and her book The Human Condition. Despite the proliferation of books and articles on Arendt's work since the mid-90s, “The Crisis in Education” does not figure all that much in writing on Arendt. It is important to situate the arguments that Arendt makes rather cryptically in this essay in the broader context of her work. Doing so not only explains the problematic in more detail but also complicates Arendt's exhortation to teachers to take responsibility for the world. How can we expect teachers to do so under the more general conditions of world-alienation to which we are all susceptible and for which we have little in the way of conceptual guidance?

Purpose/Focus of Study

My article explains the shift in thinking about the purpose of education from being primarily about and for “the world” to being for “life.” Arendt holds progressive educational ideas responsible for this shift, although she concedes that in so doing, the progressives were simply reflecting the “prejudices” of the modern age. My article explains what these prejudices are, how they have contributed to world-alienation, and the difficulties we are likely to encounter if we think that a simple “return” to teaching “content knowledge” rather than “life skills” will solve the problem.

Research Design

This article is a philosophical analysis.

Conclusions/Recommendations

If world-alienation is the fundamental problem, then the educational solution would seem to be to make education more worldly. However, my reading of Arendt's critique of the most worldly disciplines—political philosophy, history, economics, and the behavioral sciences—shows that each of these disciplines has contributed to the phenomenon of world-alienation. This suggests that simply returning to an education based on “the disciplines” (or “content knowledge,” in contemporary educational discourse) will not be all that helpful unless the “return” to the disciplines brings the problem of world-alienation to the fore and shows how each of these disciplines has, at times, contributed to this phenomenon.