ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was born into a secular, highly educated and left-wing German Jewish family and spent most of her childhood in Konigsberg, the chief town of East Prussia, where her family had long lived. Arendt's first-hand experience of Nazism and involvement in the fate of European Jews shaped much of her political thought. Arendt's one work solely on education is her essay The Crisis in Education, published in 1954 and originally given as a lecture in Germany. She did not claim to be an expert on education and makes no specific proposals about pedagogy. The purpose of centring education on transmission, however, was no longer the same. It was no longer to do so simply in order that tradition be respected and venerated, but so that it might be used to help people to decide what it was that they wished to become.
