Education Commons^™

The Insights Of Hannah Arendt And Virtue Ethics On Education, Benjamin Bellinger

Honors Theses

This paper attempts to find the purpose of education and resolve if critical thinking can be taught in education. To answer this question the paper uses Hannah Arendt’s seminal piece The Human Condition, her political essays Between Past and Future, and her journalistic controversy Eichmann in Jerusalem to formulate Arendt’s view on education. Julia Annas’ book Intelligent Virtue gives this work a framework for how one learns a virtue. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue provides the theory for how one grounds the virtues by continuing a version of Aristolean virtue ethics. While this work does not directly use Nicomachean …