A Reflective Education

09-06-2013

It is a new year, not only for Jews celebrating Rosh Hashanah but also for hundreds of thousands of college and university students around the world. As with all new things, there are surprises in store, some glorious and others traumatic. Over at Harvard, they invited Nannerl O. Keohane —past President of Wellesley College—to give the new students some advice on how to reflect upon and imagine the years of education that lay before them. Keohane refashioned some words she had given previously to students at Stanford and called them: “Self-Fashioning in Society and Solitude.”

Above all, Keohane urges students to take time to think about what they want from their education:

You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the future. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may think you’ve never been busier in your life, and that’s probably true; but most of you have “time” in the sense of no other duties that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is what you are supposed to do with your education; it’s not competing with something else. You won’t have many other periods in your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are fortunate, you’ll have another chance; but then you will be more set in your ways, and may find it harder to change.

Keohane also turns to Hannah Arendt for advice. She writes:

In the fifth chapter of her powerful work of political philosophy, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt discusses the connections between individuals and political communities. She notes that each human being is “distinguished from any other who is, was, and ever will be”—which is a vivid way of thinking about selfhood. Yet precisely because each of us is a distinct individual, we need speech and action to communicate; I cannot just sense instinctively what somewhat else is thinking. In speaking and acting, we “disclose ourselves” and thus expose ourselves to possible misunderstanding or exploitation by others, but also to the rich possibilities of communication.

Speech and action, in Arendt’s sense, cannot exist in isolation; they are meaningful only within human relationships. By the same token, “human nature”—as distinct from our more animal qualities—depends precisely on our capacity for speech and action: it is in fact through speech and action that each of us constitutes our self. This is Arendt’s distinctive contribution to our discussion of self-fashioning: the self is created not by each of us as individuals in isolation, but through the activities we share with other human beings—language, creativity, striving, politics. If your goal is to fashion a worthwhile self, you should be mindful of your surroundings and choose companions and activities that will give you opportunities to develop your language, creativity, striving, and politics in more depth.

Keohane is right that Arendt understands the fashioning of our public selves to take place through speech and action with others. The self that is created as a public self—the self that is spoken of in the public sphere—is created through the activities we share with other human beings.

At the same time, Arendt is clear that the emergence into public life of a unique self must be nurtured in the private realm. This is especially true for children, who must be protected against the public world. Children, she writes, “must be protected against the world,” which is why the child’s “traditional place is in the family, whose adult members daily return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls.” Education, Arendt insists, is not an activity of the public sphere and the world, but requires a “secure place, without which no living being can thrive.” For Arendt, children must develop outside the “merciless glare of the public realm.” Only then can they develop individually and uniquely into plural and independent persons. In order that there be a public world of plurality, we need a private world of solitude and darkness. “Everything that lives,” Arendt writes, “emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all.”

Keohane too embraces the importance of solitude in education, arguing that a reflective education must have a double aspect, looking both inwards in solitude and outwards towards society. She enlists Thoreau and Montaigne in the defense of solitude, even as she insists that a liberal arts education has, in the end, “education for citizenship.”

At a time when democracy is passionately sought by people in countries around the world, and countries that have long enjoyed democracy are struggling to sustain it against multiple pressures, education for citizenship is one of the most powerful arguments for a liberal-arts education.

What Arendt argues, however, is that what makes education supportive of citizenship is precisely its inculcation of the virtues of solitude. Only the person who knows himself and thinks for himself and thus is inured to the sway of society and social pressures is, in Emerson’s words, qualified to enter the public forum.

Precisely this question of what does it mean to educate citizens today, and how we are to respond to the crisis of apathetic yet educated citizens, underlies the upcoming Arendt Center Conference: Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis. The Conference takes place Oct. 3-4 at Bard College. And is open to the public. For now, take a look at Keohane’s speech. It is your weekend read.

-RB