Ignorant Schoolmaster

1. Circle of Power
- When the master believes and makes the student believe in their
capability, then the student will learn.
- The opposite of the circle of powerlessness and comes from the circle
of totality
- Conscious of the power of the mind
- The circle of totality must first be made - “the metaphorical book”
- Two concepts - totality and circle
- Totality - a point that cannot be moved that has supposedly
everything to launch us into which everything can be related to
- Circle - the space of all knowledge can be found; this moves
while the totality doesn’t; it grows because we relate and
discover.
- Formed by the emancipatory master
- Why use the book? The book prevents “cheating” or escape or giving
up to the master since the book has EVERYTHING the student needs.
- Once the student has gone through relations of ideas, he can now go to
the circle of power.
- As the circle of power grows, our understanding of things becomes
encompassed in how we create relations among ideas.
- Product of universal teaching
- Nothing can be kept hidden; it can only be discovered from the
student.
- There must be something for the student work on (the “book”).
- Hans Question: but isn’t the book imposing its knowledge on the
student and the book is written by masters?
- Yes it is written by masters; HOWEVER, the student gets to
decide where will he begin and end.
- It’s either he skips a page, starts in the middle, or starts at the
end.
- A benefit to be announced to the poor
- One must dare to seek out its power.
2. Circle of Powerlessness
- When the master is an explicator, he is always a length ahead of the
student
- He is keeping something from the student to prevent them from
learning more, keeping them at a structured, unlearning, pace.
 - Formed through the idea of the pedagogical myth and manifested
through the stultifying master
- We are stuck below some hierarchy of intelligence.
- Always working in society - the family
- Our power never grows and we begin to believe we are dependent on
the qualifying master.
- Product of mutual teaching
- Student no longer has confidence in himself and will follow the learned
schoolmaster.
- Source of intellectual inferiority
- We are unable to learn by ourselves; everything is hidden and we do
not discover it.
- The master shows it to us.
- The master will never reciprocate but just disseminates and will never
allow the student to escape or rebel.
- “Guise of humility” - we say we are intelligent for we do not want to be
greater or lower than anyone
3. Emancipatory Master
- Maintained difference of the two relations
- The act of an intelligence obeying only itself while the will obeys
another will
- The willingness to learn from the will of the master; the intelligence is
themselves
- Gives the “child” the will to learn
- Will over will
- Intelligence - the book; provider/avenue for knowledge
- Will - Jacotot’s push/inspirer of knowledge
- An emancipatory master is one who helps stimulates their intelligence
while providing the will.
- To be emancipated themself
- At first, it was considered to be the ignorant master (because he left
the students to their own devices).
- “Everyone is capable of learning by their own”
- Emancipation: freeing of restrictions
- Emancipatory learning: letting the student’s intelligence learn by itself
- The master recognizes that the student is capable.
- The student must be obliged to realize his own capacity.
 - Does not worry about his student for his student will learn what he
wants
- Uses universal teaching - to relate everything to each other
- Uses the BOOK as the source of intellectual authority rather than the
master
- Allows the student to understand by himself
- But then what if the student hits a brick wall? What if there is a HIDDEN
meaning and he sees that he cannot decipher by himself?
- Emancipatory master: Go do it yourself! You have everything you need!
- Why does the emancipatory master say this? He wants the student to
be in control of his own learning and therefore produces his own
results.
- The emancipatory master is ignorant in teaching but has MORAL
authority to keep the student wanting to learn through commanding
the student to attend to the book.
- The goal of the emancipatory master: to reveal an intelligence to itself
but is difficult
- If the master is not allowed to forcefully interrogate, then it assumes
we are blindly leading each other?
- Not necessarily. The ignorant master is to verify that the student
SEARCHED not FOUND, so the master wants the student to find proof.
4. Stultification
- When one intelligence is subordinated to the other
- When one intelligence submits; not free
- When it links intelligence to intelligence
- Assumes and divides individuals based on intelligence
- Inferior - those of comfort, ignorance and young
- Superior - reason, methodological and complex
- Enforced stultification is imposed, forcing someone to be dumber.
- Principal of explication
- What is explication?
- The art of simplifying things so that it can be digestible to others
- Principle of “regression ad infinitum”
- Assumes that the student ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS needs
someone to guide them
- Making sure that the student is always at a distance between
learning and understanding
- The stultifying master or the learned master
 - Uses mutual teaching
- Selection, progression and incompletion - teaches and never
ends
- Makes sures we are always at a certain progress from the lesson
- Finds a student and COMES DOWN TO THEIR LEVEL
- Forever in a perpetual state of intellectual inferiority
- There is a need of verification.
- The old master will divide the mind into faculties to impose hierarchy
of intelligences.
- Question: Why does the student let himself be stultified? In the text, it
is revealed that this curriculum is favored and used by progressives and
conservatives over many years.
- Only when Jacotot figured out the ignorant schoolmaster did he
realise that the system may be faulty.
- Evidence: The text uses the school and the family as examples of
double stultification.
- The master takes control of the entire journey and progress.
5. “Everything is in everything”
- Learning can be found everywhere as long as you have the willingness
to learn and a master that gives you that will.
- Everything you know is already within you; like how we learned our
mother tongue
- Seen through the Flemish students studying the Telemaque
- Example also is the locksmith
- O is round, L is the square
- However, still earning the same things
- “Making someone understand” is explication
- Explication is not necessary and it is losing effectiveness.
- Explication is NOT NEEDED for understanding.
- It is the explicator that needs the student to exist and be a master.
- No need for another intelligence
- Learning and understanding are two ways of expressing the same act of
translation.
- True understanding is about saying what others think in the words of
another (never more than translation).
- Evidence: Humans are speaking beings.
- “A child wants to recognize and respond to someone speaking under
the sign of equality.”
- And this is true since the beginning of the human mind.
- Translation is not just equating texts of different languages.
- Through producing another of the same text, a variation of the original,
the students showed their capability of understanding.
- Understanding is not just this translation of the text, but it is being able
to relate individuals to another individual based on equality.
- The ability to relate one’s thoughts in different languages or sentence
structure
- Why not use the exact words? It shows dependency in the master’s
words.
- Humans have a wide variety of skills that can be expected.
- There is no level or caste system.
- In truth, everyone has the same intellectual capacity.
- It is a power of the will to recognise this and get themselves out.
- We differ due to our capabilities
- But everyone can become smart.
- “Everybody is capable of learning on their own,” under the sign of
equality.
- The circle of totality is where it begins. Everyone is equally distanced
from the book.
- Universal teaching proves that anyone can learn and do what any man
could do, which is to learn something and to relate everything to it.
- The mind cannot be divided and there is only one power to paying
attention, thus one man can do what another man can do; it is a
singular power in us.
- The tautology of power may have different appearances but share the
same nature. Examples: art, tests, exercise
- Although the manifestation of power is not the same, it only represents
the quality of how we communicate. Meaning, we all don’t convey the
same way.
- “Everything is in everything” - everything is related
- All fields are connected through the nature of the same
intelligence of everyone.