Hannah Arendt Citizenship Education Analysis

Education and citizenship are always interdependent, since a citizen always needs to be educated. Citizenship education is defined as educating children, from early childhood, to become clear-thinking and enlightened citizens who participate in decisions concerning society; society here represents “in the special sense of a nation with a circumscribed territory which is recognized as a state”. After I read Hannah Arendt’s article The Crisis in Education, I believe that there are four major objectives regarding citizenship education, and they will be examined in this essay.
To start with, it’s critical for education to imbue children with knowledge of the “old world” - this is to say that citizenship education has the purpose of educating future …show more content…
Another is that education should be individualized enough to ensure no students’ potential is wasted, which will maximize the positive “newness” brought to the society. This simply requires an educational diversity. While private education is always at the forefront of controversy, personally speaking, I would argue that private education by no means is merely a waste of our social resources; instead, it allows our entire society to draw strength from the diversity of education forms. Hannah Arendt demonstrates her similar thought in The Crisis in Education - today’s education system in the U.S. is hugely misguided by the idea of “equalization”, and equalization between the “gifted” and the “ungifted” can only be achieved at the cost of the “gifted”. I believe that if it hadn’t been the coexistence of both private and public education, the overall education system would have become completely …show more content…
Arendt asserts three events as the remarks of the beginning of the modern age, including the discovery of America, the Reformation, and the invention of the Telescope (in addition to Galileo 's utilization of it). Without any exception, all three of these events have hugely shifted human’s view of the world -- from a conventional point of view that’s essentially derived from ourselves to an angle that’s outside of ourselves, even outside of the earthbound. More specifically, along with the discovery of America, the invention of maps made humans no longer see the world merely through our own eyes (with countless limitations); instead, with suddenly broadened horizons, we began to see the earth as a whole. The Reformation allowed people to establish a new world view (especially spiritual wise) that is not based on the Church’s instructions for the first time. Moreover, Galileo’s use of the telescope unprecedentedly broke human’s earth-bound nature, giving the means to humans to see the world from the