Abstract
Hannah Arendt’s essay entitled “The crisis in education”, published in the 1950s, ascribes the failure of school education in the United States to the educational trend known as progressive education and to the influence of Pragmatism. As it was originally prepared in the form of a conference, the text contains several gaps in the treatment of these themes. This article seeks to fill these gaps employing historiographic sources with the purpose of showing that Arendt selects certain facts to build a rhetorical situation - defined as a problematic situation that draws the attention of public opinion - to which her essay is an argumentative response. The article concludes that the objective of “The crisis in education” is not to discuss the history of education, but the relationships between adults and children in contemporary society, a subject that should be analyzed considering Arendtian concepts.
Keywords:
retorical analysis; Hannah Arendt; progressive education; american education