Education as action/the adventure of education: thinking with Arendt and Whitehead

ABSTRACT

Understanding and action are central themes in Hannah Arendt's thought and an idea that runs throughout her work is that whenever human beings act, they start processes. It is in this light that she saw education as a process whose aim is to make human beings feel at home in the world. Given the centrality of process in understanding action, early on in her work, Arendt reflected and drew upon the ideas of Alfred Whitehead, the philosopher of process. Education in his thought is an art and an adventure whose object should be to enable students to grasp the process of life itself and imagine different worlds. In this light, universities are crucial in creating conditions of possibility for imaginative learning and intellectual adventures. Taking action, process, imagination and adventure as my central ideas, in this paper, I make connections between Arendt and Whitehead in an attempt to think about education within and beyond ‘dark times’.

KEYWORDS:

• Understanding
• action
• process
• imagination
• adventure
• Arendt
• Whitehead

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maria Tamboukou (BA, MA, PhD) is Professor of Feminist Studies, co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, UK and co-editor of the journal Gender and Education. Her research activity develops in the areas of critical feminisms, auto/biographical narratives and studies in neo-materialism. Writing feminist genealogies is the central focus of her work. She is the author of five monographs and more than sixty journal articles and book chapters. Recent publications include the monograph Sewing, Writing and Fighting: Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture and the co-authored book Discourse and Narrative Methods.

Notes

1. For an overview of this literature, see Semetsky and Masny (2013).

2. These two notions are discussed in detail in the Human condition, but Arendt's take on thinking is further developed in her posthumous publication, The life of the mind (1981).

3. Hannah Arendt to Heinrich Blücher, letter dated 25 May 1955.

4. Arendt to Blücher, letter dated 2 February 1955, in Arendt and Blücher (1996, p. 230).

5. Although Blücher never published, his lectures are now available on line at the Blücher Archive: http://www.bard.edu/bluecher/index.htm [Accessed June 15, 2015].

6. Blücher to Arendt, letter dated 29 May 1955.

7. Blücher to Arendt, letter dated 24 April 1955.

8. The problem of reducing research activity to generic skills has attracted a lot of interest in educational studies. For most recent studies, see, amongst others, Apple (2013), Griffiths et al. (2014), Biesta (2014).

9. There is a rich body of literature on the marketisation of education where Stephen Ball's work has been formative. For an overview of this literature, see Ball (2006). See also the archive of the Journal of education policy.

10. The nine black students, who had previously undergone a rigorous interview assessing their ability to attend the school were: Melba Patillo Beals, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls Lanier, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Brown Trickey, and Thelma Mothershed Wair. They would later be known as the ‘Little Rock Nine'. See Jacoway (2007).

11. Given the limitations of this paper, I cannot expand on this literature here, but for a good overview, see Calhoun and McGowan (1997). For recent debates on the ‘Little Rock’ controversy, see, amongst others, Morey (2014), Simmons (2011) and Cole (2011).

12. I refer here to Herman Melville's well-known story: Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. See Tamboukou (2012, p. 860).

13. The notion of ‘lines of flight’ comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari philosophical vocabulary, denoting modes of resistance. For an exposition of the term in educational settings, see Tamboukou (2010).