ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt, one of the most notable political philosophers of the twentieth century, was concerned with the importance of dialogue for democracy. Arendt's concepts of dialogue as public space, action and speech, and internal dialogue are interconnected and, have important implications for education. However, it can be argued that current trends in education are having a profound impact on education and on society that challenges Arendt's notions of dialogue. Arendt's thought is original and thus difficult to characterize within a tradition. For Arendt, labour is 'the activity which corresponds to the biological processes of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. One of the main criticisms of Arendt is that such a distinction of the private, social, and public spheres makes it difficult to account for the interaction among them.
