Hannah Arendt on Classroom Authority

What if the traditional practices of education that discomfort us are the very ones that will help us achieve our progressive educational goals?

On November 16^th of this year, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a news story by Beth McMurtrie entitled “Students Crossing Boundaries,” which depicted a post-pandemic educational environment in which students were increasingly challenging the authority of their teachers and policies. The article finishes with a quote from one of her sources: “The new generation understands reasons, but they don’t understand rules . . . When you put your rules into a context, some of them are really thankful for it. But authority just for the sake of authority this generation really hates.”

Disruptive or even aggressive student behaviors may well have been intensified by the emergency virtual schooling of the pandemic, and the loosening of boundaries and structures we needed at that time, but students disliking authority obviously has a long history. For at least the past couple of decades, students have been questioning traditional academic expectations and policies—do the homework, complete required assignments, take tests, come to class and listen, don’t cheat—and some of their questions have been good ones.

They have been so good, in fact, that many teachers have begun to distance themselves from their roles as authorities in the classroom. They are seeking to create egalitarian communities in their courses, not police states. I have heard that latter language used by many faculty members in the context of some of their course policies and regulations: “I don’t want to be the technology/integrity/attendance police.” The current interest in ungrading has a footprint in this same soil. In all of these areas, faculty members seem to be driven, in different measures, by a discomfort with the notion of their authority and by a concomitant desire to offer students greater freedom in pursuit of their learning.

I want to give full credit for the good-faith practices of every educator who hopes to liberate their students from some of the arbitrary rules of conventional education. They are making freedom a value in their classrooms, which I have traditionally applauded. But in the wake of the Chronicle essay, I have been wondering how far we should go with practices designed to cede our teacherly authority to student freedom. To what extent should teachers wield their authority in the classroom? Do required attendance or participation or technology policies. or strictly enforced integrity measures, have a place in progressive pedagogy, which seeks to empower students to take ownership of their learning?

More than fifty years ago, political philosopher Hannah Arendt offered a perplexing answer to this question in an essay called “The Crisis in Education” (is there ever a time when education is not in crisis?). If you have heard Arendt’s name before, you likely know it from her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which she reports on the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Her now-famous argument was that while we view people like Eichmann—who managed the deportation of millions of Jews into concentration campus—as murderous sociopaths, he was nothing more than an unintelligent bureaucrat who accepted the authority of his superiors without question.

Arendt in 1933, decked out in existentialism gear: ironic smile, black dress, cigarette. Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hannah_Arendt_1933.jpg

But a dozen years before that book was published, Arendt writes about authority in a very different context: the classroom. Although she doesn’t mention the progressive theories of John Dewey by name, she clearly has them mind, arguing that their emphasis on lived experience over traditional bodies of knowledge or skills has created a crisis of authority in education, especially in America.

Teachers, she argues, have abdicated some of their authority, and in doing so have robbed students of something essential for their development. But not in the way that you might expect. She doesn’t suggest that students need teachers to lay down the law because she believes in the eternal and true nature of our educational traditions and practices. She makes the opposite claim: an affirmation of the authority of the teacher creates the necessary conditions for a successful revolution of the students.

Arendt rests this argument on some simple premises. The world exists in a state of constant flux. The ideas, skills, and information that helped one generation flourish should not dominate from one era to the next. Ideas and traditions have their moments, but moments are always emerging and then disappearing. Each generation must discover the knowledge and skills that they need for their specific historical context, and those will never match the knowledge and skills wielded by any previous generation. The work of rejecting, revising, or revolutionizing are necessary tasks of each generation of students.

But from these premises, which seem like an easy fit with the philosophy of any progressive educator, she makes a head-spinning philosophical turn. The way in which the new generation discovers the knowledge that will help it thrive is by pushing against the traditions of the past, and the authority of their guardians. The process of rejecting such authorities becomes the whetstone against which they sharpen their axes, which are used not only to chop down the previous generation’s idols but also build new ones with the shattered fragments.

In order for this process to work, the current generation has to embrace their authority and be willing to stand behind it—even if, and especially if, they don’t believe in their own authority or hate to exercise it. This notion sits at the heart of the essay.  “Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child,” Arendt writes, “education must be conservative”—even in the classrooms of the most revolutionary educator. This sounds like a paradox, and maybe it is, but the classrooms in which teachers exercise their authority give students the best chances to succeed in their work of developing new ideas for a changing world.

Arendt re-states this argument in the final paragraph in more developed way: Educators must “decide whether we love our children enough not to . . . leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.” In other words, when we abandon our authority and give students complete freedom in their education, we strike from their hands the tools that they need to renew the world.

None of this sits easily with me. Many faculty members, including this one, dislike authority on principle. I always had two goals for my career: I didn’t want to have a boss or be a boss. I hold a special place in my heart for students or would-be students who drop out of society and do things like hike into the Alaskan wilderness and spend three months in an abandoned school bus. Arendt would argue to me that while you might not want to exercise your authority over the students in your care, you must. Without your embrace of your authority, your students will never develop the revolutionary spirit you cherish in yourself and in young people more generally.

Throughout the pandemic, the watch words have been flexibility and compassion. These qualities belong in any course and classroom, of course (not to mention in any human being). But our emergency application of them might have tipped into theoretical and practical applications that might not have served our students well. I see a growing recognition that the authoritative structures that we rightly abandoned when we were all suffering, and then were called into question after the most intense period of the pandemic passed, have long been doing essential work for students.

None of which means that we should abandon compassion and flexibility in our teaching, especially in the context of the crisis in student mental health. Students need teachers to be more aware of, and responsive to, the life challenges they face. But they also need us to provide structure and direction—and, yes, even rules. We can find balance here. But Beth McMurtrie’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggest to me that the pendulum has swung too far into the direction of student freedom, and needs a nudge back toward the pole of teacherly authority.

But it should be a gentle nudge. I would not endorse a return to course attendance policies in which students can miss two classes and then their full course grade starts dropping by a letter with each further absence (see: Jim Lang as a new teacher). Maybe once a student has passed beyond the permitted number of absences, I could offer her other opportunities to engage with the material in a different format. But I could also use my conversation with that student to re-iterate the essential value of attendance in the course, because—for example—it’s a discussion seminar and the learning emerges from the presence of multiple humans tackling a shared problem in real time.

Better still, my syllabus would offer a full description of why attendance matters to the course. On the first day of the semester I should review my reasoning with them and give them the opportunity to ask questions. And maybe, depending upon the nature of those questions, I should continue to revisit my policy and adjust it as needed. But what I should not do, if student presence makes a difference to the course, is simply to say “Never mind, it’s too complicated, you’re adults and can decide whether you come to class or not.” That abandonment of my authority would most certainly hurt some students who would gladly embrace that freedom en route to diminishing their learning or the learning of their peers.

But when I explain such an attendance policy to students, and especially when I have to enforce it, I will be uncomfortable. I hate enforcing rules in my classroom. I fear confrontation of any kind, even with a student. I’m sure I’m not alone in these feelings. I know few—if any—college teachers who relish punishing cheaters, calling out disruptive behavior in the classroom, or calling students to task for missing class or required assignments.

But what if the very practices that cause me so much discomfort are the very ones that will help me achieve my goals as an educator—which include giving students the tools they need to analyze, critique, and even reject the authorities and authoritative structures of an unjust world?

I said above that Hannah Arendt gave a “perplexing” answer to a difficult question. It remains perplexing to me, and will send me further into her work. I wrote this essay to see how it felt to make an argument for greater teacherly authority in the classroom. It felt disquieting, and remains so. It seems to conflict with some of my core convictions about education, political life, and life more generally.

But that, I suppose, makes the best case for me to continue thinking about it.

Your comments, questions, and arguments are welcome below.

* For Arendt, this crisis in education connects to a deeper crisis in authority in the modern world, which stems from the 20^th-century turn away from traditional sources of authority, such as organized religion. My brother Tony, a political philosopher and Hannah Arendt superfan, recommends her essay “What is Authority?”, which comes from the same book, to dig more deeply into these arguments.