Caught in the Middle: Arendt,Childhood and Responsibility

This essay critiques the infection of the curriculum with the concerns of the adult political community, treating successive generations of children as if they were responsible for changing the world and that education was the vehicle. Such impulses are, in part, the result of a failure to consider childhood as a particular, liminal, space rather than a refraction of the public spaces of the agora. The drive to see education as a vehicle and schools as the site of political change is not confined to the ideological obsessions of Right or Left; both may be considered culpable. Here I illustrate the normative problem through the particulars of a number of socio-political challenges faced by ‘the World’, and in each case show why it is inappropriate to treat the school and education as the solution. Rather than teaching children how to solve the challenges of the agora, I suggest that what we in actuality do, is teach them the art and artifice of deferral and procrastination because we have failed to assume responsibility for the world. Drawing on Arendt's insights on natality, I suggest that schools should be spaces of ‘qualified’ shelter and that students should not be exposed to the harshness of political choice, nor should teachers merely act as a surrogate for political interests irrespective of their provenance or driving imperative.