Teaching the Children of Our Ruin

• In Event: Teaching in the Ruins, Learning from the Land: Grounding Curriculum in Place and Possibility

Abstract

This scholarly paper responds to recent works by Scranton (2025) and Benjamin (2025) that offer conflicting explanations about how we should approach living and working in the climate change crisis. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt, we show how higher education faculty, across the disciplines, may use some of Arendt's work to avoid heedless pessimism and reckless optimism when teaching their students. More specifically, following Arendt and noting similarities between life under totalitarianism and life under the climate crisis, we show how higher education faculty will make a significant contribution if they remind students that the challenge is to ensure the survival of humanity and not specific political or cultural groups.

Author

• Clifford P. Harbour, University of North Texas