Hannah Arendt: "Education Must Be Conservative."

Hannah Arendt was born in Linden, Germany in 1906. By the time she was seven she had lost her father and grandfather, but as her mother noticed, the deaths barely affected her. At such a young age, it is apparent that she was already beginning to develop a philosophical approach to life, because she went without mourning either loss, as she felt no point in being saddened by death. These early absences of a male figure in her life probably, if not indirectly, propelled her to a life of thinking. As a woman in her late adolescence she began a relationship in letters with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, if nothing more than to fill that absent male role.

They would eventually become lovers, and throughout both their respective marriages they were on and off again for years until Hannah's death in 1975. One of the reasons there was a pause in their correspondence was due to Arendt's assumption that Heidegger was responsible for the firing of a chair member who refused to post notice banning Jews from holding any position at Freiburg University. Ms. Arendt, a Jewish woman whose convictions led her to flee Germany after being arrested for assisting the German Zionist Association in an underground railroad operation, devoted much of her life's work to unveiling the horrors of particular European political institutions like totalitarianism. Although she studied Kant and wrote her dissertation at the university at Heidelberg on St. Augustine, she considered herself a political theorist rather than philosopher. She taught on the university level, starting out as a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley in 1955, and later Princeton, Columbia, University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research, where a research center was built in her name.

The paradox of Hannah Arendt lies in the fact that her politics and ideas of education follow two different schools of thought. Mordechai Gordon argues that her "existentialist approach to politics shapes her ideas on education" (Hannah Arendt and Education, 161) because she wrote extensively on the human processes of work, labor and action, and how each relate to each other.

As previously mentioned, she considers herself a political theorist rather than philosopher, and as such, wrote extensively on ideas regarding political protests and challenging the status quo. It is interesting then, that she stressed the need for politics and education to remain completely separate entities. In her essay Crisis in Education Arendt states that education must be conservative. What exactly does she mean by conservative education? Conservatism in its simplest definition states a reverence towards the past, towards a "great tradition" that once existed. Liberalism, then, presents a case to look to the future to change the tweaks in society and argues that there never were "good old days" or a great tradition to use as a guideline. Arendt's views on education fall somewhere in between, so to call her an education conservative is like calling President

Kennedy a conservative Democrat; both embraced liberal ideals in their discourse that places them in the middle.
A conservative educator is one that places supreme authority on the teacher. Arendt believes that students should not have the same rights as teachers, as they are not equipped in the training a teacher undergoes to present a lesson. She shares a few basic assumptions about authority with mainstream conservatives.

She believes that an authority's central role in a community or class room is mostly constructive. Since a teacher is the one leading the class and has the most knowledge of the material, any authority bestowed upon her is more effective than if a student were to go up and teach the class. Although the student may have a high level of knowledge, they are still students and not bearing the designated role of "educator."

Arendt also believes that there is an intimate connection between authority, tradition and religion. Conservatives see the three going hand in hand, as what follows with tradition bringing meaningful insight into the present, so does religion. This is not to say that Arendt shares the "fire and brimstone" rhetoric of Protestant ministers during the Great Awakening, but that she believes religion and tradition develop a sense of well-being and bridge behavior and trust with authority. Arendt necessitates an authority figure to ensure that a communities' difference in opinion can be unified by one who establishes a set of procedures and social norms to follow.

Arendt also agrees with conservatives that persuasion and rational debate are entirely different from authority. Authority is based on a hierarchal order where a figure such as an educator assumes responsibility and takes charge of the subjects taught in the classroom. Persuasion and rational debate indicate an egalitarian order where everyone is on an equal playing field and share equal knowledge to debate an issue or attempt to gain converts to their beliefs.

As stated before, Arendt cannot be considered a true conservative and some of her views tend to stray from such categorization. If she were conservative she would look to the past and see all the solutions to the world's problems in those former institutions. As it stands, she sees ineffectiveness in a "pure" conservative education, and takes a cue from Roman times, when education was a sort of indoctrination into respecting your elders and the past:

And in this business the educator could be a "fellow-contestant" and a "fellow-workman" because he too, though on a different level, went through life with his eyes glued to the past. (CE, 3)

If Arendt agreed with this practice, then her platform of reform would be nonexistent. It would be a restoration of the past, rather than a reform.

In her philosophy, she designates children and adults as belonging to different worlds. While children belong to an educative world, adults are in a world of politics, neither of which should penetrate the other. She thinks it is the responsibility of the adult to educate the child, and to keep the child as far away from the world of politics as possible. As she states in Crisis:
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. (13)

Where a traditional liberal education stresses the need for pushing ideas to the future and teaching children to be proactive in their world, Arendt feels that school age children should not be thrown into something they are not prepared for until they understand all sides. To take an example from recent events in Colorado's Overland High School, Arendt would be horrified to hear a high school teacher such as Mr. Bennish impose his political opinions on fifteen-year olds. To her, they are not schooled enough in world history to know where someone would come up with a comparison of the current President to that of a bloodthirsty dictator responsible for the annihilation of over six million people.

Normally the child is introduced to the world in school. Now school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all. (9)

This in fact highlights one of Arendt's criticisms about modern education, that educators do not take enough time with them as children and thrust them into the adult world of politics before they fully mature. I agree with Arendt on this point because there is a lot of objectivity in education that students need to receive and understand before they can make informed opinions on matters such as politics, religion and the arts.

To expect a high school student to understand and believe what should be introduced in a college classroom is to minimize his opportunity of having a different viewpoint from the teacher. A purely objective education is necessary because most students will take an opinion by a teacher and believe it to be fact. It is for this reason that I agree that education belongs in the private domain, where the only tenets of the world they see are in those of state mandated attendance. Gradually, as the child develops and goes on through the school system, Arendt believes they should look at the past with a critical eye and realize that although some historical institutions are inherently good, there is a lot that needs to be changed about the world and their education helps them develop these creative skills to go out into the public domain of the world, the public world of politics, and transform it. With regards to Arendt's unique flavor of conservatism in the classroom, I agree that there should be a reverence towards the good people and events, such as the whites who housed the blacks in the Underground Railroad, but generally acknowledged institutions such as slavery should not be taught with a sugarcoating. Other historical events, such as Vietnam should be taught objectively; it's a hot button issue that needs thorough explanation and can easily offend students who disagree with a teacher's viewpoints.

With regards to teachers, Arendt criticizes how pedagogy has developed into a science rather than an art. Many of them have mastered the art of teaching, which is planning lessons and managing the class, but have failed to master the particular subject they teach. According to Arendt, this is a problem because rather than have supreme authority over the material being taught, the teacher is now "just one hour ahead of his class in knowledge."(6)

The effect of students catching up to a teacher in knowledge of a subject area is not only debilitating for a teacher's sense of respect, but for the students as well, whose goal should be to come out of a class knowing more about a subject than they did when they came in the beginning of the school year. It's a practical critique of hers, because it's horrific to imagine a chemistry teacher stumped on the number of elements or a European history teacher who forgets that Austria-Hungary was a dual- monarchic state until 1918, but it unfortunately happens.

Arendt also makes the claim that "the scholastic standards of the average American school lag so very far behind the average standards in actually all the countries in Europe" (4) America cannot lag behind "all the countries in Europe" with regards to education, because that would mean that, at least in 1954 when this was written, all of Europe's nations were developed, which they were not.

I think Arendt made this generalization as a "wake-up call" to the average American educator who cares enough about his classroom and his country to see that America moves up on the list of "best educated civilians" but Arendt has more to say of the distinguishable quality of American schools that keeps them lagging behind. This country is known for its "equality of opportunity" she assesses, and education has a pivotal role in this. Everyone in America must attend school until the age of 16, when a child can decide whether or nor he wants to continue or drop out and enter the work force. Because school has become a mandatory institution for the youth, Arendt argues:

High school therefore is basically a kind of continuation or primary school. As a result of this lack of secondary school the preparation for the college course has to be supplied by the colleges themselves, whose curricula therefore suffer from a chronic overload, which in turn affects the quality of the work done there. (4)

She sees the suffering of curriculum extending as far as college, and I make the argument that she also views American colleges as lagging behind those found in Europe. Surely in worldly institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge you won't find introductory courses, because the students who attend university have already been selected from a smaller pool of applicants than in the American universities. Arendt offers comparison to the English school system, which, unlike the American structure, is not compulsory at all. Primary school ends around the time an American student is in the sixth grade, and at that time "the dreaded examination that weeds out all but ten percent of the scholars suited for higher education"(4) is given.

Arendt doesn't even offer such a system as an alternative to the American school systems model of equality, and offers two reasons. In England the "meritocracy" of the schools didn't garner complete support, so she determines that to instate "examinations of elimination" in this country "would have been simply impossible."(4) In her second reason she doesn't consider America sharing the same model because "such an almost physical division of the children into gifted and ungifted would be considered intolerable."(4) But why? The political climate of America is the culprit for not allowing such reinvention, she offers. While other countries in Europe realize the differences in achievement and act appropriately to ensure that the finest get ahead, this country tries too hard to ensure equality across the board.

I partially agree with Arendt that high school is a continuation of primary school, but I think that's for the first two years, around the time a child decides if they want to stay beyond the compulsory age of 16. The remaining two years of high school were designated as "college prep" and my experience in American high school adequately prepared me for college. We both think that having free and compulsory education and an equal opportunity is something that makes America a great nation, but it's also something that makes America's standards in education lower to meet the needs of every student. When it comes to whether or not this country allows everyone access or allows exclusive access for a higher percentage of achievement, equality wins over standards. I think that's what Arendt was getting at when she mentions a crisis in education, however the crisis is not only an American phenomenon, because the meritocracy has to contend with 90% of the population unable to complete their education due to standardized testing that liberal educators advocate against.

Arendt reviews the problems that exist in American schools but does not offer a solution, at least not from what can be read in the text. Regarding the issues addressed, she says in Crisis :

Nor can I discuss the more technical, yet in the long run perhaps even more important question of how to reform the curricula of elementary and secondary schools in all countries so as to bring them up to the entirely new requirements of the present world.(7)

She is unable to come up with any fundamental proposals of reform, at least in the context of her treatise. It took Mordechai Gordon, after earlier explaining that it was Arendt's philosophical standpoint that shaped her views on education to come up with what Arendt would have said had she written more extensively on the topic. In his essay and book on the scholar, he asks what can be learned from Arendt in order to achieve the goals of a democratic education. Gordon recognizes a condition that he feels all democratic educators need to take into account in order to transform their classrooms and the profession. "It is impossible to critique, change and renew the world without being thoroughly familiar with it first" (175) he states and this is faithful to Arendt's call for the necessity of education to be conservative. Following in this vein, Gordon, in agreement with Arendt, feels that "the educator is responsible more than any other factor for empowering students to become critical and active readers and learners."(177) Along with the educators, of course, are the parents, and Arendt prescribes an ultimatum for both "Anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them."(10)

Is this an effective strategy for, as Arendt used earlier in describing the British school system, "weeding" out unconcerned parents and indifferent educators? No; people are still going to bear children indifferent to the world outside their home, and there will always be bad teachers. It's a rhetorical device more than a proposal to improve the quality of students and teachers that step into a classroom, and asks for too much of an entire country to change their ways and adopt a more sensitive approach to a world that may not concern them, as long as families have a roof over their head and the teacher makes a liveable salary.

Eduardo Duarte, in the chapter The Eclipse of Thinking from Gordon's book, proposed "an Arendtian-Inspired Pedagogy of Contemplation" to fill in the gap Arendt left when she strayed from writing on education. Based on her political and philosophical writings, he was able to extrapolate enough material to compose this educational method that directly opposes the pedagogy of cooperative learning that was promoted by proponents such as Dewey in the earlier part of the twentieth century. With cooperative learning, students work in groups or teams. A pedagogy of contemplation, on the other hand, focuses on the positive independence of a student's mind, not the positive interdependence of group interaction. As Duarte states "pedagogy of contemplation, therefore, would echo the voice of the Delphic Oracle and exhort students to "stop and think" in order to take up the most challenging yet pressing of learning assignments: Know thyself!"(217) This kind of pedagogy allows for the student to think for themselves rather than rely on someone else to come up with part of an answer and another student another part of the answer. Arendt has this to say about contemplation in The Human Condition:
The decisive point of similarity, at least in Greek philosophy, was that contemplation, the beholding of something, was considered to be an inherent element in fabrication as well, inasmuch as the work of the craftsman was guided by the "idea", the model beheld by him before the fabrication process had started as well after it had ended, first to tell him what to make and then to enable him to judge the finished product (302.)

A student undergoing independent contemplation would behold the idea and be able to work independently, and in the journal writing example Duarte offered, the student could take 15 minutes of class time to write how they feel about Austria-Hungary as a dual-monarchic state (to use the example from earlier) and it being their own original idea rather than the idea of another student in the class. A pedagogy of contemplation follows Arendt's conservative views on education for several reasons. Firstly, by separating students and having them work independently, there is no risk of having any one student's voice overwhelmed by others in a group setting. As Arendt states "by being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority."(5) Working independently avoids the tyrannical rule of other students and allows for individuals to shine. As discussed earlier in relation to the British school system, this allows for a distinction in academic ability in students rather than clumping them all together.

Lastly, the process of "stopping and thinking" requires a look to the past, where, just as Arendt made very clear in her distinct form of conservative education, one could understand where that came from and improve it in their own lifetime.

I believe independent work is a very effective tool, especially for shy students who don't have the social skills some of their other peers possess, but bear the knowledge. A pedagogy of contemplation works well with students who have a high intrapersonal intelligence and like to delve into their mind to come up with solutions to problems and questions to ask their authority, the teacher. Had Arendt taken a position at a New York City high school I believe she would have been a good teacher of any subject because of her conservative approach to the profession. A teacher in full authority of the class and full authority of the material, while allowing individualism in her student's contemplation is a teacher more likely to get results than a teacher who can't control a class, doesn't have anything innovative to teach and stifles the intrapersonal in each child.