FOR A PUBLIC HORIZON IN CHILDREN'S EDUCATION

Abstract

This paper endeavors to discuss the extent of the crisis in the modern world within the scope of education highlighted by Hannah Arendt in her essay “The crisis in education”. The questioning about “the obligation that the existence of children imposes on all the society” is the key to interpret an ethical-political belief in the personal development of new generations in a world disenchanted by the strangeness of the human and the flagrant denial of criteria that the past - as an authority - transmitted to us as support for the action and judgment about the world. If the whole responsibility for the world should not be attributed to education, at least it should be able to insert children into a public culture that allows them to return to the public aspect of the world to appropriate it. The issues addressed by Arendt mobilize us to think that only an education established on a public horizon is capable to educate children so that they have the opportunity, when young, to act in the world and be able to discern the civilization from barbarism, the fair from the unfair, the truth from the lie, the good from the evil. If their reflections reveal the utopia of their thinking, they also reveal the hope and the collective responsibility that the advent of children in a pre-existing world imposes on us.