Education and the political: a defence of Arendt’s separation

This paper presents the controversial separation of education from the realm of the political as proposed by Hannah Arendt. For the sake of children and the future of the world, we must, according to Arendt, separate education from the political. If we do not do so, we not only expose our children to the blinding light of public existence before they are prepared for such exposure but also risk imposing on them our beliefs and prejudices, thus robbing them of the opportunity to create something new. By reading Arendt’s argumentation for the separation as developmental and temporal, Gert Biesta is able to claim that this separation is based on a psychological misunderstanding and that it renders children incapable of political action. I propose here that, by considering the separation instead to be a question of protection, not only can we heed the two essences of education that Arendt articulates in The Crisis in Education, namely natality and conservation, but we can also form a clearer understanding of the separation and of her educational thinking more broadly.