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Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”

“The Crisis in Education”

Hannh Arendt

(1954)

Space for Notes

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The general crisis that has overtaken the modern world everywhere and in

almost every sphere of life manifests itself differently in each country,

involving different areas and taking on different forms. In America, one of its

most characteristic and suggestive aspects is the recurring crisis in education

that, during the last decade at least, has become a political problem of the first

magnitude, reported on almost daily in the newspapers. To be sure, no great

imagination is required to detect the dangers of a constantly progressing

decline of elementary standards throughout the entire school system, and the

seriousness of the trouble has been properly underlined by the countless

unavailing efforts of the educational authorities to stem the tide. Still, if one

compares this crisis in education with the political experiences of other

countries in the twentieth century, with the revolutionary turmoil after the

First World War, with concentration and extermination camps, or even with

the profound malaise which, appearances of prosperity to the contrary

notwithstanding, has spread throughout Europe ever since the end of the

Second World War, it is somewhat difficult to take a crisis in education as

seriously as it deserves. It is tempting indeed to regard it as a local

phenomenon, unconnected with the larger issues of the century, to be blamed

on certain peculiarities of life in the United States which are not likely to find

a counterpart in other parts of the world.

Yet, if this were true, the crisis in our school system would not have

become a political issue and the educational authorities would not have been

unable to deal with it in time. Certainly more is involved here than the

puzzling question of why Johnny can’t read. Moreover, there is always a

temptation to believe that we are dealing with specific problems confined

within historical and national boundaries and of importance only to those

immediately affected. It is precisely this belief that in our time has

consistently proved false. One can take it as a general rule in this century that

whatever is possible in one country may in the foreseeable future be equally

possible in almost any other.

Aside from these general reasons that would make it seem advisable for

the layman to be concerned with trouble in fields about which, in the

specialist’s sense, he may know nothing (and this, since I am not a

professional educator, is of course my case when I deal with a crisis in

education), there is another even more cogent reason for his concerning

himself with a critical situation in which he is not immediately involved. And

that is the opportunity, provided by the very fact of crisis–which tears away

facades and obliterates prejudices–to explore and inquire into whatever has

been laid bare of the essence of the matter, and the essence of education is

natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world. The

disappearance of prejudices simply means that we have lost the answers on

which we ordinarily rely without even realizing they were originally answers

to questions. A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires

from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis

becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments,

that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes

us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides.

However clearly a general problem may present itself in a crisis, it is

Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”

nevertheless impossible ever to isolate completely the universal element from

the concrete and specific circumstances in which it makes its appearance.

Though the crisis in education may affect the whole world, it is characteristic

that we find its most extreme form in America, the reason being that perhaps

only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics.

In America, as a matter of fact, education plays a different and, politically,

incomparably more important role than in other countries. Technically, of

course, the explanation lies in the fact that America has always been a land of

immigrants; it is obvious that the enormously difficult melting together of the

most diverse ethnic groups–never fully successful but continuously succeeding

beyond expectation–can only be accomplished through the schooling,

education, and Americanization of the immigrants’ children. Since for most of

these children English is not their mother tongue but has to be learned in school,

schools must obviously assume functions which in a nation-state would be

performed as a matter of course in the home.

More decisive, however, for our considerations is the role that continuous

immigration plays in the country’s political consciousness and frame of mind.

America is not simply a colonial country in need of immigrants to populate the

land, though independent of them in its political structure. For America the

determining factor has always been the motto printed on every dollar bill:

Novus Ordo Seclorum, A New Order of the World. The immigrants, the

newcomers, are a guarantee to the country that it represents the new order. The

meaning of this new order, this founding of a new world against the old, was

and is the doing away with poverty and oppression. But at the same time its

magnificence consists in the fact that from the beginning this new order did not

shut itself off from the outside world–as has elsewhere been the custom in the

founding of utopias–in order to confront it with a perfect model, nor was its

purpose to enforce imperial claims or to be preached as an evangel to others.

Rather its relation to the outside world has been characterized from the start by

the fact that this republic, which planned to abolish poverty and slavery,

welcomed all the poor and enslaved of the earth. In the words spoken by John

Adams in 1765–that is, before the Declaration of Independence–”I always

consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and

design in Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish part

of mankind all over the earth.” This is the basic intent or the basic law in

accordance with which America began her historical and political existence.

The extraordinary enthusiasm for what is new, which is shown in almost

every aspect of American daily life, and the concomitant trust in an “indefinite

perfectibility”–which Tocqueville noted as the credo of the common

“uninstructed man” and which as such antedates by almost a hundred years the

development in other countries of the West–would presumably have resulted in

any case in greater attention paid and greater significance ascribed to the new-

comers by birth, that is, the children, whom, when they had outgrown their

childhood and were about to enter the community of adults as young people,

the Greeks simply called οί νєοι , the new ones. There is the additional fact,

however, a fact that has become decisive for the meaning of education, that this

pathos of the new, though it is considerably older than the eighteenth century,

only developed conceptually and politically in that century. From this source

there was derived at the start an educational ideal, tinged with Rousseauism and

in fact directly influenced by Rousseau, in which education became an

instrument of politics, and political activity itself was conceived of as a form of

education.

The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times

onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by

birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a

serious misconception: instead of joining with one’s equals in assuming the

Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”

effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial

intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to

produce the new as a fait accompli , that is, as though the new already existed.

For this reason, in Europe, the belief that one must begin with the children if

one wishes to produce new conditions has remained principally the monopoly

of revolutionary movements of tyrannical cast which, when they came to

power, took the children away from their parents and simply indoctrinated

them. Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always

have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate

adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political

activity. Since one cannot educate adults, the word “education” has an evil

sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is

coercion without the use of force. He who seriously wants to create a new

political order through education, that is, neither through force and constraint

nor through persuasion, must draw the dreadful Platonic conclusion: the

banishment of all older people from the state that is to be founded. But even

the children one wishes to educate to be citizens of a utopian morrow are

actually denied their own future role in the body politic, for, from the

standpoint of the new ones, whatever new the adult world may propose is

necessarily older than they themselves. It is in the very nature of the human

condition that each new generation grows into an old world, so that to prepare

a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike

from the newcomers’ hands their own chance at the new.

All this is by no means the case in America, and it is exactly this fact that

makes it so hard to judge these questions correctly here. The political role that

education actually plays in a land of immigrants, the fact that the schools not

only serve to Americanize the children but affect their parents as well, that

here in fact one helps to shed an old world and to enter into a new one,

encourages the illusion that a new world is being built through the education

of the children. Of course the true situation is not this at all. The world into

which children are introduced, even in America, is an old world, that is, a pre-

existing world, constructed by the living and the dead, and it is new only for

those who have newly entered it by immigration. But here illusion is stronger

than reality because it springs directly from a basic American experience, the

experience that a new order can be founded, and what is more, founded with

full consciousness of a historical continuum, for the phrase “New World” gains

its meaning from the Old World, which, however admirable on other scores,

was rejected because it could find no solution for poverty and oppression.

Now in respect to education itself the illusion arising from the pathos of the

new has produced its most serious consequences only in our own century. It has

first of all made it possible for that complex of modern educational theories

which originated in Middle Europe and consists of an astounding hodgepodge

of sense and nonsense to accomplish, under the banner of progressive educa-

tion, a most radical revolution in the whole system of education. What in

Europe has remained an experiment, tested out here and there in single schools

and isolated educational institutions and then gradually extending its influences

in certain quarters, in America about twenty-five years ago completely

overthrew, as though from one day to the next, all traditions and all the

established methods of teaching and learning. I shall not go into details, and I

leave out of account private schools and especially the Roman Catholic

parochial school system. The significant fact is that for the sake of certain

theories, good or bad, all the rules of sound human reason were thrust aside.

Such a procedure is always of great and pernicious significance, especially in a

country that relies so extensively on common sense in its political life.

Whenever in political questions sound human reason fails or gives up the

attempt to supply answers we are faced by a crisis; for this kind of reason is

Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”

really that common sense by virtue of which we and our five individual senses

are fitted into a single world common to us all and by the aid of which we move

about in it. The disappearance of ‘common sense in the present day is the surest

sign of the present-day crisis. In every crisis a piece of the world, something

common to us all, is destroyed. The failure of common sense, like a divining

rod, points to the place where such a cave-in has occurred.

In any case the answer to the question of why Johnny can’t read or to the

more general question of why the scholastic standards of the average American

school lag so very far behind the average standards in actually all the countries

of Europe is not, unfortunately, simply that this country is young and has not

yet caught up with the standards of the Old World but, on the contrary, that

this country in this particular field is the most “advanced” and most modern

in the world. And this is true in a double sense: nowhere have the education

problems of a mass society become so acute, and nowhere else have the most

modern theories in the realm of pedagogy been so uncritically and slavishly

accepted. Thus the crisis in American education, on the one hand, announces

the bankruptcy of progressive education and, on the other, presents a

problem of immense difficulty because it has arisen under the conditions and

in response to the demands of a mass society.

In this connection we must bear in mind another more general factor

which did not, to be sure, cause the crisis but which has aggravated it to a

remarkable degree, and this is the unique role the concept of equality plays

and always has played in American life. Much more is involved in this than

equality before the law, more too than the leveling of class distinctions, more

even than what is expressed in the phrase “equality of opportunity,” though

that has a greater significance in this connection because in the American

view a right to education is one of the inalienable civic rights. This last has

been decisive for the structure of the public school system in that secondary

schools in the European sense exist only as exceptions. Since compulsory

school attendance extends to the age of sixteen, every child must enter high

school, and the high school therefore is basically a kind of continuation of

primary school. As a result of this lack of a 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.

At first glance one might perhaps think that this anomaly lies in the very

nature of a mass society in which education is no longer a privilege of the

wealthy classes. A glance at England, where, as everyone knows, secondary

education has also been made available in recent years to all classes of the

population, will show that this is not the case. For there at the end of primary

school, with students at the age of eleven, has been instituted the dreaded

examination that weeds out all but some ten per cent of the scholars suited for

higher education. The rigor of this selection was not accepted even in

England without protest; in America it would have been simply impossible.

What is aimed at in England is “meritocracy,” which is clearly once more the

establishment of an oligarchy, this time not of wealth or of birth but of talent.

But this means, even though people in England may not be altogether clear

about it, that the country even under a socialist government will continue to

be governed as it has been from time out of mind, that is, neither as a

monarchy nor as a democracy but as an oligarchy or aristocracy the latter in

case one takes the view that the most gifted are also the best, which is by no

means a certainty. In America such an almost physical division of the

children into gifted and ungifted would be considered intolerable.

Meritocracy contradicts the principle of equality, of an equalitarian

democracy, no less than any other oligarchy.

Thus what makes the educational crisis in American so especially acute is

Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”

the political temper of the country, which of itself struggles to equalize or to

erase as far as possible the difference between young and old, between– the

gifted and the ungifted, finally between children and adults, particularly

between pupils and teachers. It is obvious that such an equalization can

actually be accomplished only at the cost of the teacher’s authority and at the

expense of the gifted among the students. However, it is equally obvious, at

least to anyone who has ever come in contact with the American educational

system, that this difficulty, rooted in the political attitude of the country, also

has great advantages, not simply of a human kind but educationally speaking

as well; in any case these general factors cannot explain the crisis in which

we presently find ourselves nor justify the measures through which that crisis

has been precipitated.

These ruinous measures can be schematically traced back to three basic

assumptions, all of which are only too familiar. The first is that there exist a

child’s world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and

must insofar as possible be left to them to govern. Adults are only there to help

with this government. The authority that tells the individual child what to do

and what not to do rests with the child group itself–and this produces, among

other consequences, a situation in which the adult stands helpless before the

individual child and out of contact with him. He can only tell him to do what he

likes and then prevent the worst from happening. The real and normal relations

between children and adults, arising from the fact that people of all ages are

always simultaneously together in the world, are thus broken off. And so it is of

the essence of this first basic assumption that it takes into account only the

group and not the individual child.

As for the child in the group, he is of course rather worse off than before.

For the authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger

and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever

be. If one looks at it from the standpoint of the individual child, his chances to

rebel or to do anything on his own hook are practically nil; he no longer finds

himself in a very unequal contest with a person who has, to be sure, absolute

superiority over him but in contest with whom he can nevertheless count on the

solidarity of other children, that is, of his own kind; rather he is in the position,

hopeless by definition, of a minority of one confronted by the absolute majority

of all the others. There are very few grown people who can endure such a

situation, even when it is not supported by external means of compulsion;

children are simply and utterly incapable of it.

Therefore 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. In any case the result is that

the children have been so to speak banished from the world of grown-ups. They

are either thrown back upon themselves or handed over to the tyranny of their

own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot

rebel, with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and out of

which they cannot flee to any other world because the world of adults is barred

to them. The reaction of the children to this pressure tends to be either

conformism or juvenile delinquency, and is frequently a mixture of both.

The second basic assumption which has come into question in the present

crisis has to do with teaching. Under the influence of modern psychology and

the tenets of pragmatism, pedagogy has developed into a science of teaching

in general in such a way as to be wholly emancipated from the actual material

to be taught. A teacher, so it was thought, is a man who can simply teach

anything; his training is in teaching, not in the mastery of any particular sub-

Arendt, Hannah - crisis in education.pdf

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