The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
Interpretation
Totalitarian education focuses on eliminating independent thought rather than fostering beliefs.
Hannah Arendt highlights a crucial aspect of totalitarian regimes: the educational systems under such governments do not aim to cultivate personal beliefs or convictions. Instead, they work to suppress the ability of individuals to think critically or form their own opinions, thus ensuring conformity and obedience within the society.
In practice
In a discussion on the dangers of authoritarian regimes, this quote can illustrate how education can be manipulated.
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friendβs presence, is concerned with the common world.
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.
It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.
Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments β and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
My generation's parents told their children, "Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class." But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that's hard to outsource, hard to automate.
You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.
Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent
Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation
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