What is schooling?

In the following, I begin the project of encircling what the activity of schooling entails and what its foundations are. Or, in other words, what marks out an activity as being an activity of schooling? Just as many of the thinkers I draw on in the following, I basically enquire into the conceptual and practical features of educational processes but attempt to narrow the inquiry down to those activities which are specifically scholastic. This means, first, that I distinguish schooling from fostering, care, training, adult learning, upbringing and other processes covered by the term education. Second, it means that, by turning to previous and recent debates about education and how to study it, I try to outline significant features of what constitutes the educational. The debate concerns, on one hand, whether there are significant differences between how educational theory is constructed in the English-speaking countries and in the predominantly German-inspired countries and, on the other hand, what these differences might be. Some of the features I highlight are specifically continental or Germanic in origin while others are present in both traditions. In the second part, which contains a rereading of Hannah Arendt, she is presented as a continental thinker who carries with her significant thoughts from this tradition, which, as shown in the first reading of her educational writings earlier, tends to be overlooked in the literature. On the basis of these sections, I argue for a collectivist account of the activity of schooling, whose foundation is a collective or communal engagement with, and attention towards, the common world through the representations of it brought to the classroom by the teacher. This entails a rereading of ‘The Crisis in Education’ where the emphasis is placed on the concept of plurality rather than natality as has been the norm in scholarship on Arendt’s educational thinking thus far. In the third part of this chapter, I begin to ‘fill out’ the gaps in Arendt’s educational thinking, or perhaps it would be more respectful to say that I pick up where she left off. In ‘The Crisis in Education,’ and to a lesser extent in ‘Reflections,’ Arendt unfolds the foundations of education and attempts to outline what marks out educational processes from other ways of being present in the world. She never presumed to define what was to take place in the classroom and insisted that these particulars “must really be left to the experts and the pedagogues” (Arendt, 1958/2006a, p. 192). 82I, however, venture a bit further into these particulars than Arendt did, ¹ laying with the introduction of the two concepts of skholé and bearing with strangers, which I claim are implicitly embedded in Arendt’s account of education, the foundation for the subsequent discussion of what, in fact, it is that teachers and students do when engaging in the activity of schooling.