Education & Belonging in a Hostile World?

Conceptualized by Pia Rojahn

Hannah Arendt’s oeuvre opens up the opportunity to reflect on education and belonging(ness) in a hostile world. The question of belonging not only arises in her analysis of totalitarianism (cf. Arendt 1951), but already in her essays on being a Refugee or being a Jew (cf. Arendt 1943 & 1944). An excerpt of Arendt’s thoughts on the emergence of ‘loneliness’ and ‘isolation’ before totalitarianism completely unfolded, can be found in her text on “Ideology and Terror” (1953). This essay can be read in relation to the Human Condition (1958), where Arendt outlines her critique of Modernity. Arendt’s concept of education and her critical stance on schooling are discussed with reference to “The Crisis in Education” (1958). While the “Crisis in Education” and The Human Condition are texts that are continuously discussed in educational discourse, “The Jew as a Pariah” is less common.   

Arendt’s essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” (1944) analyses different ways of creating belongingness in a hostile environment. However, she focuses on the seemingly negative experience of being an outsider. By characterizing four typical pariahs – Heinrich Heine, Bernard Lazare, Charlie Chaplin and Franz Kafka –, Arendt draws a colorful image of how to deal with experiences of exclusion and turn those experiences into something enabling and powerful. The pariah is contrasted with the parvenu, who tries to assimilate herself no matter how painful and alienating it is. The description of the four pariahs tries to illustrate alternatives to assimilation that do not root in denying oneself. By extending Arendt’s train of thought to educational processes, it is possible to argue that the experience of non-belonging is fruitful for formation (Bildung) because it enables the outsider to take distance and pushes them to redefine themselves constantly. However, it also shows that we need to rethink our dominant idea of how we understand educational processes: does it need a coherent individual in its center and a harmonic beginning and ending? Or is it rather the constant experience of disharmony, distance and exclusion that enables an individual to evolve?

On the basis of the recent Irish novel Last Ones Left Alive (2019) by Sarah Davis-Goff, it is possible to explore the concept of belonging in the context of a catastrophic world a bit further. The novel imagines a world where human beings are constantly threatened by skrakes (Davis-Goff’s zombies) and therefore only know two ways of living: as outliers or members of a closed city. For example, one chapter includes a dialogue between the protagonist, Orpen, who grew up on an island without skrakes (and only two other people, her mother and her partner, Maeve) and the former city member, Cillian, which addresses different ideas about belonging(ness).

Using this material, it is possible to discuss the different ideas of (non)belongingness in those texts and advance their importance for education – especially in the context of a ‘hostile’ surrounding. Moreover, the seminar was primarily offered for students who want to become teachers to give them the opportunity to reflect on their notions of (non)belongingness and what it means for their teaching. Through reading and discussing theoretical and fictional texts, it becomes possible to link the different areas of the teacher’s education: their subject (English), its didactics and general educational ideas connected with the teacher’s profession.

Reading Material

»      Arendt 1944 – The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition

»      Arendt 1953 – Ideology and Terror

»      Arendt 1958 – The Human Condition

»      Arendt 1958 – The Crisis in Education

»      Sarah Davis-Goff 2019 – Last Ones Left Alive

Further References

»      Arendt 1943 – We Refugees

»      Arendt 1951 – The Origins of Totalitarianism