한나 아렌트의 '악의 일상성'의 관점에서 본 교직의 문제

The Problem of Teaching Profession with Reference to Hannah Arendt's Concept of 'The Banality of Evil'

The purpose of this essay is to make out and ascertain the nature of teacher's customary life with reference to Arendt's concept of 'the banality of evil'. According to the concept, evil exists in the extremely ordinary, normal, and plain behaviors most of which are taken to be moral. However the ordinary behaviors considered as normal are permeated and contaminated even without any consciousness by evil. In contrast to the commonsense understanding, they have the high possibility to be immoral. In this sense, evil is ordinary, conventional, trite, and wide-spread; in a word, evil is banal. It is in a totalitarian and autocratic society like Nazi Germany that the banality of evil is easily formulated and well disclosed. It is formed in the process that people adapt themselves to an poor and inadequate surroundings of a totalitarian society. Well-illustrated in the case of Adolf Eichman, a German war criminal convicted as one of murderers of Jews during World WarⅡ, the banality of evil can be characterized by 3 traits: 1) to have no proper understanding and no definite consciousness of vocation of the chosen job when one chooses one's job, 2) not to think the effects of one's behavior on the standpoint of others, and 3) to use the customary symbolic official words which are easy to hide the wicked intention and make people hard to understand its practical meaning. The conclusive trait of the banality can be epitomized as inability and evasion to think the effects of one's behaviors with reference to universal norm and value seriously and conscientiously. Generally these traits can be detected in most of societies which share the characteristics to some degree similar to that of a totalitarian society. The teachers in Korea take up the lowest bureaucratic level in a centralized authoritarian system of education. Therefore, the teachers' community takes on the characteristics similar to that of the totalitarian society. This research have discussed and disclosed the nature of the banality of evil that the community in Korea is most likely to embrace.