Education as action/the adventure of education: Thinking with Arendt and Whitehead

Understanding and action are central themes in Hannah Arendt's thought and an idea that runs throughout her work is that whenever human beings act, they start processes. It is in this light that she saw education as a process whose aim is to make human beings feel at home in the world. Given the centrality of process in understanding action, early on in her work, Arendt reflected and drew upon the ideas of Alfred Whitehead, the philosopher of process. Education in his thought is an art and an adventure whose object should be to enable students to grasp the process of life itself and imagine different worlds. In this light, universities are crucial in creating conditions of possibility for imaginative learning and intellectual adventures. Taking action, process, imagination and adventure as my central ideas, in this paper, I make connections between Arendt and Whitehead in an attempt to think about education within and beyond ‘dark times’.