The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who know no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn. The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all people were equally intelligent. From this postulate, Jacotot devised a philosophy and a method for what he called "intellectual emancipation"--a method that would allow, for instance, illiterate parents to themselves teach their children how to read. The greater part of the book is devoted to a description and analysis of Jacotot's method, its premises, and (perhaps most important) its implications for understanding both the learning process and the emancipation that results when that most subtle of hierarchies, intelligence, is overturned.

The book, as Kristin Ross argues in her introduction, has profound implications for the ongoing debate about education and class in France that has raged since the student riots of 1968, and it affords Ranciere an opportunity (albeit indirectly) to attack the influential educational and sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (and others) that Ranciere sees as perpetuating inequality.

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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

The Parallels of Pedagogy and Production, 2007-05-27
Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation traces two paths: intellectual emancipation discovered through the retelling of Jacoto's "universal teaching" method that was happened upon by chance; and, stultification by institutionalized teaching meant to impart knowledge and increase intelligence. The stultifying methods include the testing for a capacity of knowledge by widespread examination and the belief that pedagogy has explication as its end. The method of stultification supports itself by imposing a hierarchy on intelligence. As Rancière demonstrates, capacity does not equal intelligence; pedagogy has nothing as its end; and to teach is to teach nothing.

Rancière's theory of intellectual emancipation challenges conservative approaches to education. With emphasis by curricula for K-12 directed toward teaching for the "No Child left behind" examinations enacted under the Bush Administration, one need only look at the concrete reality of its stultifying presence in public education. Yet, if we are to take up the cause for intellectual emancipation, critical questions arise regarding the division of labor by entrance into colleges and universities of higher education.

The Ignorant Schoolmaster challenges the institutionalization of learning that reiterates the system of class domination that tells the poor that they are incapable of learning beyond what the system gives them, that to learn is to reiterate that same system that tells them they have less intelligence than the middle-class that exploits them.



25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

Astonishing work: a manifesto for pedagogy and politics, 2004-08-07
I'm constantly amazed that more people haven't read this book, or even heard of it; it should be considered among the new classics of Continental political thought.

Rancière's text does several things at once: most simply, it tells the story of the eighteenth-century revolutionary pedagogue Joseph Jacotot, who developed a method of "panecastic" education which he considered the universal route to mental emancipation. But at the same time Rancière resurrects Jacotot's doctrine. Through a marvelous, sustained sleight-of-hand Rancière plays with its tone and narrative voice, this whole book works as a twentieth-century political manifesto at the same time as a work of history. It is radically egalitarian -- in fact, after reading the book I am not sure that anyone other than Jacotot and Rancière has fully understood the meaning of real, radical egalitarianism. And it is a real book on teaching, all the same, as part of its goal is to evangelize "panecastic" teaching and summarize this general method for teaching.

Not to take anything away from Rancière's other important work, which also deserves more exposure, but this book is incredible, maybe his best, and should be read by a much wider audience.

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