The crisis in education
Hannah Arendt gave the lecture The Crisis in Education for Erwin Loewenson's 70th birthday on May 13, 1958 in Bremen . The corresponding font was launched in the same year. The American version The Crisis in Education also appeared in the Partisan Review in 1958 . The political thinker has only very rarely dealt with educational questions. Here she dealt with concepts of education on a philosophical basis. The theme is contemporary education in the United States . A new edition of the German text was published posthumously in 1994 .
Content and reception
content
According to Arendt, the educational crisis is only "a particular aspect of the general crisis" in the United States. She elaborates on her thesis that this is an opportunity to develop something new and points out the special role of education for the United States as a country of immigration: "... it is obvious that the enormously difficult, never quite, and yet always over Expect a successful fusion of the most foreign parts of the people only through the schools, the upbringing and Americanization of the immigrant children can take place. "
In the USA, according to Hannah Arendt, the ideal of education is influenced by Rousseau , who saw education as a means of politics and political activity itself as a form of education. Ideally, upbringing is an act of persuasion, but it can also fail. The question of upbringing arises anew for every generation. In dictatorships , those in power try to manipulate children in particular. Adults, on the other hand, should and cannot be brought up, according to Arendt. “Anyone who wants to raise adult people really wants to patronize and prevent them from acting politically.” She cites the problems in the southern United States as an example . Here an attempt was made to “teach” the whites tolerance towards colored people. This was not possible because the (mostly white) adults tried to solve their own problems through the children. They themselves were not convinced of the value of tolerance and did not raise their children in this way either.
In the following, Hannah Arendt goes into what she says was a “radical turn” in upbringing in the USA, which took place around 1933. The "progressive education" has "thrown all proven teaching and learning methods overboard." As a result, "all the rules of common sense have been pushed aside". In addition, there were the effects of mass society on the field of education.
Arendt briefly points out that equality or "equality of opportunity" is the basis of education in the USA. This leads to the fact that all children attend high school and only in college does the preparation for the study take place. The college curriculum is (1958) completely overloaded for this reason. There is no selection of the best in school in the USA. Since everyone “should” be the same, the difference between children and adults, “especially between pupils and teachers, if possible” is blurred. This is done at the expense of the gifted and the authority of the teacher.
To explain it, she names "three ruinous core beliefs" that lead to a crisis in upbringing. First, the children should manage themselves as much as possible. The group of children with each child is “much more tyrannical than the strictest authority of an individual person [it] can ever be.” The result is “ conformism on the one hand and lack of stability on the other.” The second disastrous view concerns teaching . The pragmatism and modern psychology on which, according to Arendt, the educational system is based, mean that everything has been focused on teaching. The specialist training of teachers was neglected. This results in a “loss of authority” on the part of the teachers if they are only a little ahead of the learner in the material and this goes hand in hand with the renunciation of coercive means. Thirdly, the basic thesis of pragmatism is "that you can only know and recognize what you have done yourself ...". "Learning" is replaced by "doing" and "working" by "playing". This leaves the children in an “artificial children's world” and not prepares them for the adult world. The recognition of these three fundamental errors gives rise to the analyzed crisis in education.
In the following, Hannah Arendt wants to clarify "which aspects of the modern world and its crisis have shown themselves in the educational crisis ..." and what can be learned from them. According to Arendt, parents are responsible for the “life and development of the child as well as for the continued existence of the world.” However, these two points can contradict each other, since on the one hand the child is in front of the world and on the other hand the world is in front of the new children (before the new generation ) must be protected. Hannah Arendt elaborates on the first point. The development of a child must take place in a protected space - in the family . The family forms a protection against the public . The problem now lies in the nature of "private" and "public" in modern times . For workers and women this development represents a real liberation, while for children it is “an abandonment and an extradition”. In modern times, the school, or rather the teacher, takes on the task decided by the public to introduce children into the adult world. This task again has the above aspects: responsibility towards the world and responsibility towards the child. "Anyone who does not want to take responsibility for the world should not father children and should not help raise children."
Furthermore, Arendt points out the difference between the qualification and authority of the teacher. For her, qualification means “that he knows the world and can teach about it, but his authority rests on his assuming responsibility for this world.” She claims that authority has been abolished today (1958) - “that the Loss of authority that began in politics and ended in private ”. "Authority has been abolished by adults, and this can only mean one thing, namely that adults refuse to take responsibility for the world into which they gave birth to children."
According to Arendt, people can interrupt and stop such processes by “acting” and “reflecting”.
- "The problem of education in the modern world is that, by its very nature , it can not do without either authority or tradition , although it takes place in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held by tradition."
From this she concludes that one should not try to raise adults and that children should not be treated like adults. For Arendt, natality (nativity) is here, as in many of her other works, especially in Vita activa or From active life , the decisive opportunity for humanity to make a new beginning. It is therefore a task of upbringing to prepare the children "for their task of renewing a common world."
reception
According to Derwent May, Arendt was thinking about children and adolescents at the time, since she had dealt with the 1957 race riots , during which black children were taken by buses to white-dominated schools against the will of their white parents, which was also forcibly expressed, a circumstance that Arendt sharply criticized. This view was met with widespread contradiction. She also taught at universities and had developed her theory of natality, according to which every generation makes a good new beginning possible. In the Arendt Handbook, Wolfgang Heuer and Stefanie Rosenmüller summarize the text and postulate that the treatise could also be entitled “Education and Politics”, because Arendt argues against an analogy between the political and family spheres.
output
Hannah Arendt: The Crisis in Education. In: Between the past and the future. Exercises in Political Thought I. Texts 1954–1964 . Edited by Ursula Ludz, Piper, Munich 1994, 2nd reviewed edition 2000, ISBN 3-492-21421-5 , pp. 255-276
literature
- Wolfgang Heuer, Stefanie Rosenmüller: The crisis in upbringing. In: Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter, Stefanie Rosenmüller (eds.): Arendt manual. Life, work, effect. JB Metzler, Stuttgart Weimar 2011, ISBN 978-3-476-02255-4 , pp. 77f.
- Derwent May: Hannah Arendt. An important representative of German-Jewish culture. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-453-03795-2 , pp. 134-137, American. Original edition 1986
Web links
- Audio version of the speech The crisis in education. NDR broadcast. Made available online through the archive of the future . Part 1 (MP3; 18.2 MB). Part 2 (MP3; 18.3 MB). As of April 19, 2010
Individual evidence
- ↑ published in Angelsachsenverlag, Bremen 1958
- ↑ Partisan Review 25, 1958, No. 4, pp. 493-512. A revised American edition came in: Between Past and Future. New York out in 1961.
- ↑ Hannah Arendt: The crisis in education. In: Between the past and the future. Exercises in Political Thinking I., Munich 1994, here (2000), pp. 255–276
- ↑ Arendt (2000) pp. 255f
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 257
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 258
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 259
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 261
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 262f
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 264
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 265
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 266
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 269
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 270
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 270
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 272
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 271
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 275
- ↑ Arendt (2000) p. 276
- ↑ Derwent May (1990) pp. 130f
- ↑ Derwent May (1990) p. 134
- ↑ Wolfgang Heuer, Stefanie Rosenmüller: The crisis in education. In: Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter, Stefanie Rosenmüller (eds.): Arendt manual. Life, work, effect. Stuttgart Weimar 2011, p. 77f