Arendt and Teacher Authority

Introduction

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is a philosopher and political thinker who is most famous for her writings on the genealogy of totalitarianism, her theory of political action, and her analysis of evil in the context of the Holocaust. Born in Germany to a secular Jewish family, she fled to Paris in 1933 and then later to the United States, which granted her citizenship in 1951. It was in the United States where she gained prominence as a public intellectual; she also held academic positions there at several higher education institutions, including the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research.

Although not conventionally thought of as a philosopher of education, Arendt’s two primary essays on education, “The Crisis in Education” (1961a/2006) and “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959), both originally published in the mid-twentieth century, position her as an educational conservative who sought to recuperate teacher authority and the teaching of tradition in...