The University, Teacher Education, and Bearing Witness at the Border When Political Institutions Fail

• In Event: Education at the Borders: Rights, Refugees, and Responsibilities

Abstract

Noting that the price of the freedom to act in politics includes both the potential of lying and the devastating erasure of the referent by the “modern lie,” Arendt, by the end of “Truth and Politics,” invokes two public institutions that are vested with the power to shelter the “historical referent.” Specifically, she names the judiciary and education as two sites that, although they are established and supported by the powers that be, stand outside the struggle of politics in their endeavour to preserve and bear witness to factual truth. According to Arendt (2006a), the judiciary and education are ideally protected against social interests and political power, and thus simultaneously provide both a refuge and an active site for the faithful interpretation and dissemination of historical events. As Arendt writes, “the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents...comprehends much more than the daily information supplied by journalists” (261).
While educational sites are permeated with and implicated within the prevailing modes of reception that condition the way we hold, interpret, and disseminate factual truth, thus never truly occupying some hermetically sealed space outside of politics, to admit as much does not rebuff the peculiar (aspirational) responsibility that Arendt vests in certain educational sites. Indeed, in this paper, I consider the significance of charging the University and Teacher Education, with the responsibility of providing a refuge and an active site for bearing witness to events that have been purposefully managed to remain at the edge of historical legibility and/or are entirely disavowed by the ruling powers. Specifically, I focus on the state sanctioned abuses of migrant children and their families occurring in the Southern border of the U.S. At one level, I explore the particular responsibility of the University – as an institution supposedly safeguarded from politics – amidst a situation in which, as Arendt (1973) once observed, “human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights [when] no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them” (292).
Short of guaranteeing rights, what role might the University as an institution play regarding the plight of the stateless? At another level, I explore how Teacher Education, concerned as it is with cultivating adults who must introduce the world to children, has a responsibility to prepare adults for bearing witness in multiple ways: helping us not only register the actuality of the state-sanctioned violations occurring at the border, but also, just as vitally, grasp the very brokenness and compromises of the ideals that define “our” world. In the face of newly erected and operative concentration camps in North America, can Teacher Education bear witness to the constellation (history) of camps that exist and that formerly operated (whether we know it or not) on the nation’s behalf? What might it mean to learn to introduce “this world” – with state sanctioned agnosia, violations, and broken ideals – as a teacher?

Author

• Mario Di Paolantonio, York University