Teaching Arendtian Thinking

“The teacher’s qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-à-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world.”

-Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education"

Nearly midway through my first year as a high school teacher, my mind returns to these lines from Arendt’s “The Crisis in Education” quite often. These sentences strike me as containing some of Arendt’s plainest explanations of what teachers actually do. Teachers need to have both a broad and deep knowledge of the world to be able to lead newcomers into it. They also need a particular attitude toward the world in order to lead with authority, an attitude which Arendt defines here as “assum[ing] responsibility” for the world and elsewhere in her essay as loving the world.  A teacher, Arendt suggests, is someone who stands between her students and the broader world into which we were all thrown at birth, and a good teacher is someone who is able to lead them into an understanding of the world that inspires a renewed commitment to it. Teachers, in other words, seek to help young people feel at home in the world by accomplishing their transition from their beginning as “strangers and newcomers” in an already existing world to their maturity as people ready and willing to assume responsibility for the world through their freedom to act and change it.

While I find this a helpful and inspiring framework for understanding the role of teachers in a society, this vision of teaching is also frustratingly (and perhaps intentionally) ambiguous. While Arendt is clear what she means by “world” as an aspect of the human condition, she gives no indication what the “this” might be specifically when she imagines the teacher saying, “This is our world.” The question is: what should teachers point to when they teach their students about the world?

The problem is that Arendt’s analysis of the modern crisis in education suggests that this question is in some sense unanswerable in today’s world. Arendt is clear that the crisis in education is a crisis of authority and tradition: in a world no longer structured by the past, it is difficult to say for sure what “the world” is and what newcomers need to know about it in order to do more than simply make a living to stay alive (and even this is difficult when educators recognize that many of the jobs today's students will have don’t exist yet).  But while it may be difficult to tell what the world is when it is changing so rapidly, Arendt is clear that education does work when teachers show that they love the world despite its complexity or, I believe in the best cases - because of its complexity. Teachers regain authority by assuming responsibility for this world in crisis and showing that they love it.

I have caught only glimpses of what it might mean to really lead my students into the world in the way I think Arendt describes. I think particularly of my ninth grade “World Literature” class which challenges me to think about how to present the entire world - including its historical dimension - to my students through diverse but finite number of literary representations of human experience. Last September, I saw an opportunity to connect our discussion of nationalism in Lord of the Flies and E.B. White’s essay “Intimations” to the debate regarding military response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. While I didn’t manage to integrate this connection fully into my lesson plans, I had several conversations with my classes in which we the themes and concerns presented in the novel and essay helped illuminate underlying political tensions of the issue that were not obvious from the news coverage alone. It may be that glimpses of this kind of engaged teaching and learning about the world are all that we can expect in a complex world, but I hold onto them and strive for them as I design my lessons.

Perhaps another source of inspiration for teaching in a complex and rapidly changing world is a historical figure that Arendt does not discuss in her essay on education, but who she discuses elsewhere as a profound teacher. Thanks largely to Plato’s allegory of the cave, Socrates has a profound if implicit influence on many of our metaphors for teaching and learning.

In “Thinking and Moral Considerations” Arendt paraphrases what happens when Socrates introduces people to a more true understanding of the world: “you will see that you have nothing in your hand but perplexities, and the most we can do with them is share them with each other.” As I read it, if Arendt’s ultimate goal is to get people to “think what we are doing,” then her discussion of Socrates as someone who could get people to think serves as a model for education. In a world so obviously full of perplexities, the most important thing to do is share them and discuss them, especially with newcomers.

In Socrates’ time and for much of western history since, the activity of thinking (philosophy) was seen as inimical to politics, but as Arendt’s work testifies, there are times of crisis, times “when the chips are down,” in which thinking becomes politically necessary. In the preface to Between Past and Future she suggests that in a world oriented toward the future rather than structured by the tradition of the past, the need to think “became a tangible reality and perplexity for all; that is it became a fact of political relevance.” Teachers today must teach critical thinking by first loving and caring about the perplexity of our current global, political, environmental, political, and technological situation. Arendt believes that when teachers assume responsibility for the world through this committed critical engagement with the world, they also “save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.” Therefore we must seize every opportunity to share the perplexities of our times with young people, for doing so might inspire them to take up the task of thinking about and re-making the world for themselves.

-Steven Tatum