Thinking about crises with Hannah Arendt

An exercise in thinking about education, politics and the pandemic

Abstract

With the new Coronavirus pandemic, the word crisis has been widely used in public debate. Our objective is to propose a reflection on the crisis in education in Brazil and its effects on the field of humanities in the light of the concepts of politics, education and crisis in Hannah Arendt. This article, therefore, has the horizon of its reflections to think about the meaning of the humanities as an educational practice in the school experience in the face of the current problem posed to the field. Through an investigation of the ethical sense of educational practice, we present a counterpoint to the current pedagogical discourse in force in the public debate. We will call into question the notion of isolation, a word that gained prominence with the pandemic, but which we propose to interpret from Arendt's conceptual framework as a phenomenon prior to it and that has sensitive effects for education and politics as it would be the product of the disappearance of common sense.