If education is concerned with the possibility of a significant transformation of our individual and collective existence, to leave to the next generation the possibility ‘to set the world straight’, as Arendt puts it, a challenge educationalists face is how to deal with forms of inequality and injustice that are not merely accidental, but ‘institutional’ (i.e. the result of how the elder generation has come to organize communal life). The very persistence of phenomena like generational poverty, racism or homophobia today forms a disgrace and is often the cause that we feel ourselves very uncomfortable and culpable when confronted with these phenomena. This explains the moral indignation we, educationalists, often feel regarding people who seem disinterested in or unsusceptible to these issues, as well as the persistent longing for measures that promise to eradicate these forms of inequality and injustice. Hence the idea that we are responsible for nurturing appropriate moral sensitivities in children (e.g. by setting the example ourselves) and the idea that we have no choice but to constantly intervene in educational practices (e.g. educational policy issuing that schools take measures for promoting tolerance and mutual understanding, that school structures be reformed to secure more equality, etc.)

We have no intention to question this. However, we also believe that it may lead to what Furedi has analyzed as a far-reaching politicization of education. Education, following Arendt, stands in danger of being reduced to an instrument for extrinsic (political) goals, with the significant effects that the elder generation absolves itself from the responsibility to address pressing issues of communal life and burdens the young generation with a task that isn’t theirs, and that this new generation is denied the opportunity to be initiated in a common world without immediately having the responsibility to alter this world. As such ‘the essence of education’ is betrayed.

In this paper we suggest an alternative way of relating to issues of institutionalized injustice/inequality, which escapes the pitfalls of both a moralizing attitude and continual policy-interventions, without, however, lapsing into cynicism or resignation. Our main inspiration is a scene in Minelli’s film The Band Wagon (1953), discussed elaborately by Cavell (2005). In this scene, Fred Astaire starts dancing, while involving a black shoeshine boy. The dance routine could be read as one in which racist power structures and colonial motives are displayed and sustained: Astaire, the big star; the black man condemned to play the role of a servant; and, moreover, the fact that Astaire’s dance routine has appropriated a cultural element that traditionally and rightfully belongs to the black community. However, Cavell reads the dance routine as permitting a temporary transcendence of existing power structures, hence opening up the possibility of a transformation or even emancipation. This transformation/emancipation does not take place on the level of the actual order and institutionalization of social identities and positions (since after the dance, as Cavell concedes, nothing has changed in the actual social and political conditions the black man finds himself in). 

Agamben, G. (1999). Potentialities. Collected essays in philosophy (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H. (1968). The Crisis in Education. In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin. Cavell, S. (2005). Philosophy the day after tomorrow. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.