Session Information
13 SES 05, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
“And although Socrates denies that thinking corrupts, he does not pretend that it improves anybody either. It rouses you from sleep, and this seems to him a great good for the City”
Hannah Arendt Life of the mind, p178
Those working in the Arts and Humanities have, in recent times, found themselves under increasing pressure to justify being paid with public monies to engage in research and to introduce students to subjects and practices in these areas. Responses to this pressure are familiar - claims that skills are transferrable, arguments that the arts and humanities cultivate a responsive and sensitive citizenry, demonstrations of the contribution to cultural capital and the economy, and so forth –but they have an unconvincing ring. The idea of a direct causal relation between an identifiable intervention and an effect, often presupposed in outcome driven and evidence-based discourses that rely upon quantifiable forms of measurement, sits uneasily with practices of education in the arts and humanities.
Hogan (2010) tells us that since the time of the Greeks, education has been harnessed in the service of a diverse array of ends, be they church, nation, or economy. The appeal to ‘education for its own sake’, while affectively compelling, tells us little about the practice of education, the intimate relation of means and ends in education, and its intrinsic value. The a priori definition of ‘what works’ and ‘what counts’ in education fails to comprehend the matter and the value of the diverse practices of thinking. It is for this reason that I turn to the writing of Hannah Arendt.
Arendt writes of the rise of algorithmic thought whereby an empty functionalism that has lost all sight of ends combines with a faith in endless progress that has lost a sense of the world. The double face of bureaucratisation and instrumentalisation of education in the service of other ends might seem in tension, although Arendt’s point is that one end is readily supplanted by another. We are familiar with her commitment to education’s role in preserving a sense of the richness and enduring nature of our world that outlasts our appearance and disappearance; the interminable discourses and dialogues that we have about the world humanises what would otherwise remain inhuman. Education’s relation to thinking is, however, more complex. Although, thinking readily serves other ends, Arendt argues that it is a destructive and useless activity, that we have the urge or the need to think, and that it transcends the given. To ask what thinking is for is as absurd, for her, as to ask what living is for. There are no outcomes to thinking. Indeed, it is often experienced as pathos rather than mastery.
Arendt’s reflects upon the role of thinking in education and differentiates it from knowledge, cognition, learning, and indeed critical thinking construed as problem-solving. By re-examining the question of thinking in education we can better communicate the matter of education in study and research in the arts and humanities and what matters in education.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition Chicago: University of Chicago Press -- (1968) Men in Dark Times, New York, Harcourt. -- (1958) The Life of the Mind, 2 vols., London, Secker & Warburg -- (1982)Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Brighton, Harvester Press. Dewey, John (1916) Democracy and Education. London: MacMillan Hogan, Padraig (2010) The New Significance of Learning: Imagination’s Heartwork. Nussbaum, Martha (2010) Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton University Press. Rogoff, Irit (2010) “Education Actualised” in E-Flux, v 14. (3) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/%E2%80%9Ceducation-actualized%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-editorial/
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