The Battle of Little Rock: Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Childhood and Education

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s 1959 essay critiquing forced integration, “Reflections on Little Rock,” is widely debated, but less has been said about the positions she takes on education and childhood in this essay. Drawing on archival and historical materials, this article posits an answer to why notoriously obstinate Arendt accepted Ralph Ellison’s critique of her stance on parents of integrators: Ellison’s portayal of these parents aligned with Arendt’s requirement in “The Crisis in Education” that parents introduce children to the old world. It then explicates the problem this acceptance poses for Arendt’s insistence on an apolitical childhood arbitrarily demarcated at age eighteen. It also finds that this position is further undermined by the biographies of the teenage integrators themselves. Finally, it proposes viewing politics as a process of “becoming”—an idea found in Arendt’s work. This would permit political participation for maturing teenagers, while protecting younger children from the harshness of politics.