This paper will defend the separation of education from the political put forth by Hannah Arendt against recent critique of her position. Arendt in her few writings on education emphasises an inherent tension in education between the existing world, and the coming into it of a new generation. This is nothing new, but the conclusion that she draws from it was at the time remarkable. By separating completely the realm of education from the realm of the political Arendt not only questioned progressive and conservative education, but also the dominant proposition that education should be a means towards a more democratic society. This radical conclusion has irked Arendt scholars since, and led many of them to follow the lead of Seyla Benhabib, by reading with Arendt against Arendt (Benhabib 1994, Gordon 2001). Many have thus attempted to sidestep the separation of the political from education in order to enlist Arendt’s powerful concepts, both those present in her educational writings and those in her political thinking, in modern critical and democratic educational positions. Few subsequent readers of Arendt’s work have seriously engaged the separation, and those that have in fact engaged it have refuted it.[1] This paper will present the critique put forth by Gert Biesta, since it seems to be the most substantial critique, and since his educational thinking is elsewhere highly influenced by Arendt. I will attempt to show how Biesta fails in his endeavour to dismantle the separation, since Biesta essentially misinterprets what the separation concerns.

Biesta proposes that the separation is based on a developmental and temporal understanding of the educational process, and that the language used in defining it is a psychological language. This leads Arendt to a naturalisation of the categories of childhood and adulthood, thus excluding children by virtue of ability from political action. By reading Arendt’s argumentation for the separation as developmental and temporal, Biesta is able to claim that what it entails is that children are incapable of political action in the arendtian framework. There is however very little evidence in The Crisis in Education that this is what Arendt meant to say. Rather it seems that what she was chiefly concerned with was the protection of childhood and education from the infringement of political concerns and what she called the light of the public. The separation will thus here be interpreted not as a psychological question of development, but as a question concerning protection. The developmental aspect of Arendt’s argument can however not be ignored, but this does not necessarily lead to the strict psychological and temporal understanding Biesta proposes. I will attempt here instead to outline a more basic understanding of it as the simple notion that children and adult do in fact develop through their experiences with the world and in the case of children through education as well. By downplaying the developmental aspect, or by not overemphasising it, I believe we are able more clearly to understand Arendt’s reasons for separating education from the political.  

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