Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt

For the sixth meeting of the Reading Network we engaged with Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt. The meeting was opened by Ilya Zrudlo, a PhD student at McGill University in Montreal. Ilya is interested in the moral and political dimensions of modern education and you can follow his research and reading @IZrudlo on Twitter. Here are the questions he posed. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

1. What do we think about Arendt’s critique of progressive education? To what extent are her concerns about education still motivated today?

2. Arendt links the concept of authority to responsibility. What do we think about this, and what do we think about the implications for education?

3. Although Arendt eschewed the labels “liberal” and “conservative”—she didn’t think these categories were all that helpful in political theory— she famously seems to opt for a conservative or conservative-leaning position in education. Some people have found it difficult to reconcile their perception of Arendt as a generally liberal or progressive figure with her seemingly conservative take on education. What do we think about this?

4. Arendt pokes holes in two modern approaches to history: the one that seeks to identify hidden laws that moves all of history (the cunning of reason, class struggle, etc.) and the other that suggests that human beings can pragmatically ‘make history’ in a straightforward sense. The failure of both of these approaches, she argues, has led to the disappearance of history. This loss is partially responsible for our modern condition, in which we are either completely isolated and lonely or pressed together in masses, becoming uniform and conforming. Do we agree with what she says here? What implications might there be for the role of education as a force in history, on the one hand, and for history education specifically, on the other?