How to exist politically and learn from it: Hannah arendt and the problem of democratic education

Teachers College Record

Volumn 112, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 556-575

  Biesta, Gert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950671526     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: 14679620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. See, for example, Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987);
2. Henry Giroux, Schooling for Democracy: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age (London/New York: Roudedge, 1989);
3. Michael Apple and James Beane, Democratic Schools (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1995);
4. Walter C. Parker, Educating the Democratic Mind (New York: SUNY Press, 1995);
5. Wilfred Carr and Anthony Hartnett Education and the Struggle for Democracy: The Politics of Educational Ideas (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1996);
6. Carlos A. Torres, Democracy, Education and Multiculturalism: Dilemmas of Citizenship in a Global World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998);
7. Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997);
8. Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne, "What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy," American Educational Research Journal 41, no.2 (2004): 237-69;
9. Gert Biesta, Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Litdefield, 2006);
10. Gert Biesta, "Education and the Democratic Person: Towards a Political Understanding of Democratic Education," Teachers College Record 109, no.3 (2007): 740-769
11. See Gert Biesta and Robert Lawy, "From Teaching Citizenship to Learning Democracy: Overcoming Individualism in Research, Policy and Practice," Cambridgejournal of Education 36, no.1 (2006): 63-79; Biesta, "Education and the Democratic Person."
12. See Apple and Beane, Democratic Schools.
13. See also Carole Pateman, Partiapation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
14. See, for example, David Kerr, "Citizenship Education in England-Listening to Young People: New Insights from the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study," International Journal of Citizenship and Teacher Education 1, no.1 (2005): 74-96; he refers to this as the "citizenship dimensions."
15. I refer to Arendt as a political thinker and not a political philosopher because she has explicitly rejected the latter label. See Hannah Arendt "What Remains? The Language Remains': A Conversation with Günter Gaus," in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Books), 3-4.
16. See, for example, Mordechai Gordon, "Hannah Arendt on Authority: Conservativism in Education Reconsidered," Educational Theory 49, no.2 (1999): 161-80;
17. Mordechai Gordon, ed., Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing our Common World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002);
18. Wouter Pols, "Voorbij de pedagogiek van de regel [Beyond the education of the rule]," Pedagogiek 21, no.3 (2001): 195-99;
19. Aaron Schutz, "Is Political Education an Oxymoron? Hannah Arendt's Resistance to Public Spaces in Schools," Philosophy of Education 2001 (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2002), 324-332
20. Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Education," in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 195.
21. Hannah Arendt The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 143. Hereafter. THC.
22. THC, 143.
23. Hannah Arendt "What Is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 170.
24. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Ibid.
25. See Arendt THC, 178.
26. Arendt, THC, 176-177
27. Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" 151.
28. Arendt THC, 180.
29. Ibid., 198-199
30. Arendt's point is slighdy more subtle in that she argues that all human activities "are conditioned by the fact that men live together" (THC, 22). Labor and work can be conducted without the presence of others, although "a being laboring in complete solitude would not be human but an animal laborans," just as a being "working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, diough not homo faber" (22).
31. See Arendt, "Crisis," 189.
32. See also Gert Biesta, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common: Education and the Language of Responsibility," Interchange $5, no. 3 (2004): 307-24; Biesta, Beyond Learning.
33. See Arendt "Crisis," 180-85.
34. For this, see Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
35. See Arendt, "Crisis,"
36. See Biesta, Beyond Learning.
37. Hannah Arendt "Understanding and Politics (die Difficulties of Understanding)," in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, ed. H. Arendt and J. Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1994), 322.
38. Arendt "Understanding and Politics," 307-8.
39. See Arendt "Understanding and Politics," 313.
40. Arendt "Understanding and Politics," 308.
41. I deliberately use the phrase existing politically and not living politically because in Arendt's vocabulary, the latter is an oxymoron.
42. Phillip Hansen, "Hannah Arendt and Bearing with Strangers," Contemporary Political Theory 3(2005): 3-22.
43. See Hansen, "Bearing with Strangers," 5.
44. Arendt "Understanding and Politics," 315.
45. Understanding and Politics, 315 Ibid.
46. Hansen, "Bearing with Strangers," 6.
47. Bearing with Strangers, 6 Ibid.
48. Bearing with Strangers, 6, Ibid.
49. Arendt THC, 57.
50. See also Biesta, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common."
51. See Hannah Arendt Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
52. Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 42.
53. See also Lisa J. Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 152-153
54. Disch, The Limits of Philosophy, 153.
55. Arendt Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 44.
56. Disch, The Limits of Philosophy, 157.
57. Ibid., 158.
58. Ibid., 158-159
59. Ibid., 159.
60. The Limits of Philosophy, 157, Ibid.
61. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 241.
62. Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, 159.
63. Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," 322.
64. Hansen, "Hannah Arendt and Bearing with Strangers," 6.
65. See Gordon, Hannah Arendt and Education.
66. See also Hansen, "Hannah Arendt and Bearing with Strangers," 11.
67. See also Biesta, "Education and the Democratic Person."