Hannah Arendt on Educational Thinking and Practice in Dark Times: Education for a World in Crisis

In her renowned and provocative essay, The Crisis in Education, Hannah Arendt observed that a ‘crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgements, that is, with prejudices’. Taken as a whole, Arendt’s work provides an enduring provocation to think and to make judgements about education and the issues that impact on it, such as political, economic and cultural disruption and uncertainty. Drawing together the leading thinkers on Arendtian ideas and education, this collection explores the role and promise education can have in preparing the future generation to understand, to think about and to act within the world. Concluding the same essay on the crisis in education, Arendt declared education to be the point at which love for the world meets love for those who are newcomers to it. The authors respond to Arendt’s call for responsibility and authority in education, providing a leading edge thinking, analysis and agenda setting for public education systems and the world in dark times.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Hannah Arendt and the Promise of Education in Dark Times, Wayne Veck (University of Winchester, UK) and Helen M. Gunter (University of Manchester, UK) Part I: The Promise of Education 1. Public Education: The Challenge of Educational Authority in a World Without Authority, Roger Berkowitz (Bard College, USA) 2. Thinking with Arendt: Education and Temporality, Faisal Baluch (College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, USA) 3. Education in and for a World of Difference, Jon Nixon (University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) Part II: Education and Crisis 4. Identity as Other and the Promise of the Narrative Imagination: An Arendtian Vision for Educational Theorising, Jo Dillabough (University of Cambridge, UK) 5. The Politics of Education Policy, Helen M. Gunter (University of Manchester, UK) 6. Hannah Arendt, Education and the Refugee Crisis: Natality, Compensatory Schooling and Assimilation, Wayne Veck (University of Winchester, UK) Part III: Education for Love of the World 7. Hannah Arendt and Holocaust Education, Marie Morgan (University of Winchester, UK) 8. Can You Learn Democracy in a Classroom? John Dewey and Hannah Arendt on the “Paradox of Size”, Aaron Schutz (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA) 9. Thinking in Dark Times: Learning to Repair and Renew Our Common World, Eduardo Duarte (Hofstra University, USA) Conclusion: The Promise of Education Revisited, Wayne Veck (University of Winchester, UK) and Helen M. Gunter (University of Manchester, UK) References Index

About the Author :
Wayne Veck is Senior Lecturer in Education at Winchester University, UK, having started his teaching career as a teacher of English to students from Afghanistan and Iraq seeking refuge in the UK. Helen M. Gunter is Professor of Educational Policy at the University of Manchester, UK, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Review :
This compelling collection will be of interest to anyone seeking alternative perspectives on education to those which currently dominate. Each essay demands thoughtfulness in the process of reading, and subsequently, our research and practice, in order to enact our natality on the world. An outstanding collection of essays that puts Hannah Arendt into conversation with pressing educational issues – from today’s global refugee crisis as it pertains to the rise of populist movements and renationalization trends to putting the public back in public education. A must read. Many enduring lessons are on offer in this volume, which advances Arendtian scholarship as well as educational thought, and itself embodies the thoughtful research it calls out for. The threads of the book are stitched together well by the editors in a concluding chapter, which makes important the notion of action as well as thoughtful research. This is a truly heroic effort.