In this episode Rita Koganzon and I discuss two essays by the philosopher Hannah Arendt: “Crisis in Education” and “Reflections on Little Rock.” The former was first published in Partisan Review in 1958 and the latter in Dissent in 1959. Rita gives an account of the context for the two essays and how they are related. We discuss Arendt’s critique of a number of progressive educational reforms including learning as doing and emancipating children from the authority of adults. Rita explains Arendt’s concept of natality and her understanding of the relationship between knowledge and authority. We discuss Arendt’s reasons for pessimism as far as school integration as an educational enterprise and why the Little Rock essay generated such controversy. We also discuss the relevance of Arendt’s reflections on education to our own time.
Rita Koganzon is the associate director of the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy and Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the themes of education, childhood, authority, and the family in historical and contemporary political thought. Her first book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought (Oxford, 2021) examines the justifications for authority over children from Jean Bodin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Her research and essays have been published in the American Political Science Review and the Review of Politics, as well as in the Hedgehog Review, National Affairs, The Point, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University, and her BA in History from the University of Chicago. Check out Rita’s essay “A Tale of Two Educational Traditions.”
“Crisis in Education” can be found in Between Past and Future and “Reflections on Little Rock” in Responsibility and Judgment.
SPEECH AND CENSORSHIP #2: James Stoner on Willmoore Kendall’s ”The ’Open Society’ And Its Fallacies”
SPEECH AND CENSORSHIP #1: Kindly Inquisitors with Jonathan Rauch
LIBERAL EDUCATION #7: Roundtable with Corey, Koganzon, & the Zuckerts
LIBERAL EDUCATION #6: Henry Bugbee, “Education and the Style of our Lives” with Joseph M. Keegin
LIBERAL EDUCATION #5: Zena Hitz, Jonathan Marks, and Roosevelt Montás on Liberal Education
LIBERAL EDUCATION #4: Elizabeth Corey on Michael Oakeshott’s ”A Place of Learning” and ”Learning and Teaching”
LIBERAL EDUCATION #3: Pavlos Papadopoulos on Eva Brann’s Paradoxes of Education in a Republic
LIBERAL EDUCATION #2: Rita Koganzon on Hannah Arendt
LIBERAL EDUCATION #1: Michael and Catherine Zuckert on Leo Strauss’s “What is Liberal Education?” and “Liberal Education and Responsibility”
TOTALITARIANISM AND IDEOLOGY #7: Roundtable with Cavanagh, Howland, Link & Pontuso
TOTALITARIANISM AND IDEOLOGY #6: Nathan Pinkoski on François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism of the Twentieth Century
TOTALITARIANISM AND IDEOLOGY #5: Clare Cavanagh on the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz
TOTALITARIANISM AND IDEOLOGY#4: James Pontuso on Václav Havel’s Audience, The Unveiling and Protest
TOTALITARIANISM AND IDEOLOGY #3: Daniel J. Mahoney on Raymond Aron’s ”The Opium of the Intellectuals”
TOTALITARIANISM AND IDEOLOGY #2: Perry Link on ”China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier”
TOTALITARIANISM AND IDEOLOGY #1: Jacob Howland on Yevgeny Zamyatin’s WE
Pamela Jensen on Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert
Fred Bauer on Norman Podhoretz’s Making It
Elizabeth Amato on William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee: Reflections of a Planter’s Son
Matt Dinan on Aristotle’s social virtues
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Lit Society: Books and Drama
Ex Libris
Write The Book: Conversations on Craft
Just So Stories
The Federalist Papers
Fresh Air
Myths and Legends