I found this simple line from Anne Snyder insightful:
I entered the real world naive, but healthy.
Is it not the case today that many seem hellbent on sending kids out into the world “informed” but shockingly unhealthy?
There are many things that have drawn me to Hannah Arendt over the years, but one that I often think about is this story from her 1982 biography, For Love of the World, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl:
Arendt chastised American progressive education for artificially depriving children of their protected, prepolitical time and space, the school; for destroying the natural authority teachers should have over children; and for enjoining children to behave like little adults with opinions of their own. Adults must not, she urged, forgo their responsibilities for children as children, they must not refuse to children a sheltered period for maturation, for being at home in the world. “Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation (by virtue of natality] brings; but precisely because we base our only hope on this, we destroy everything if we try to control the new [so] that we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative.” Hannah Arendt was very strict about this principle, and she maintained it in her own political action. Some years later, when a branch of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam contacted her for a donation, she agreed, but then she changed her mind after reading their pamphlet: “When we talked over the phone, she informed the committee’s fund raiser, “I was not aware that you intend to involve high school students, and I regret to tell you that I will not give a penny for this purpose, because I disagree with the advisability of mobilizing children in political matters.” Her rule of thumb was “from eighteen to eighty,” and she was flexible only at the upper limit.
As was so often the case with Hannah Arendt, her plea for conservatism was the vehicle for a revolutionary impulse. So-called revolutionaries, who try to insure the longevity of their revolution through education produce indoctrinated, unspontaneous young: “To [forcefully] prepare a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike from the newcomers’ hands their own chances at the new.” Educators should introduce children to the world, give them the tools for understanding it accurately and impartially, so that the children can, when they mature, act in the world intelligently.
I’m glad I went back and read this again, because I think about it all the time. For one thing, it simply emphasizes what we all should know intuitively: that children should be given a broad span of time to mature while feeling safe and confident. I remember years ago my sister showing me a video on Facebook of a friend of hers, a teacher, marching little 5-year-olds around in front of a classroom with picket signs of some kind. (I don’t recall if this was before or after reading Arendt’s biography.)
Now, I have no doubt that this teacher believed she was merely involving the children in something meaningful, instilling in them a strong sense of civic duty and whatnot. But Arendt’s response to this behavior toward children is twofold. 1) Rather than installing a strong sense of civic duty in them, it more likely will instill a strong sense of anxiety, about one or any number of issues, and possibly do so from an age before which they have no memory. And 2) the tragedy is deeper and the irony thicker because, by trying to control the next generation’s revolution, you smother that revolution, you rob them of the chance to offer what is new or revolutionary in themselves.