Natality and Development in Education: A Rapprochement Between Hannah Arendt and Gert Biesta?

Abstract

Background/Context: Recent accounts of learning from experience in education tend to impoverish development and temporal processes as constructive categories for thinking about freedom and action. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s critique of development, Gert Biesta’s 2010 article, “How to Exist Politically and Learn from It: Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Democratic Education,” makes the case for a mode of democratic education that excludes the concept of development. In doing so, Biesta interprets Hannah Arendt’s work as both problematic and constructive for democratic education. Purpose: This article challenges Biesta’s reading of Arendt’s concept of natality and development by focusing on what she calls the “double aspect of the child.” It questions Biesta’s deconstruction of development and attempts to show that natality and development cannot be that easily separated, especially if we are to maintain Arendt’s radical account of freedom. The purpose of the research is to reclaim Arendt’s “temporal framing” of childhood and adulthood, and to argue that development, while not unproblematic in traditional psychological accounts, is in fact a necessary condition of her concept of natality—what she calls the essence of education. Research Design: The argument in this article is developed through a critical interpretation and discussion of the works of Gert Biesta and Hannah Arendt, with a specific focus on their ideas about action and new beginnings, and the role of development for an adequate understanding of natality in education. Conclusions/Recommendations: In making my case for a more radical reading of natality in education than Biesta offers, I present an alternative, with the aid of David Archard’s work, to the standard normative account of the developmental model that Biesta attributes to Arendt when he describes her account of the “child”–“adult” relation as “too psychological.” I then appeal to Arendt’s understanding of temporality in her essay “Between Past and Future,” in which she names the “gap” in time as the juncture where freedom can occur. I attempt to show that this gap mirrors our actual human birth and our reception into a language community, in such a way that suggests how freedom and action entail a kind of “unready readiness” that is not unique to newborns. However, unlike Biesta, who acknowledges as much with respect to our insertion into the human world, I maintain that this temporal gap in time is a constitutive feature of development and, as such, of natality. I conclude by arguing that development and becoming are important concepts that should not be left solely to the discipline of psychology if we are to reduce the likelihood of developmentalism in education.