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The ignorant schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation

Item Type Book
Author Jacques Rancière
Translator Kristin Ross
Date 1991
Language eng
Short Title The ignorant schoolmaster
Library Catalogue K10plus ISBN
Place Stanford
Publisher Stanford University Press
ISBN 978-0-8047-1969-8
# of Pages 148
Date Added 15/10/2024, 19:24:28
Modified 15/10/2024, 19:24:52

Notes:

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the important business of the master is to transmit his knowledge to his students so as to bring them, by
degrees, to his own level of expertise. Like all conscientious professors, he knew that teaching was not
in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he
knew equally well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of
distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short,
the essential act of the master was to explicate […]

6-8

Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that very
incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. It is the explicator
who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such.
To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before
being the act of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into
knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the
intelligent and the stupid.

The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex,
from the part to the whole. It is this intelligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by
adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the student has
satisfactorily understood what he learned. Such is the principle of explication. From this point on, for
Jacotot, such will be the principle of enforced stultification.

[…]

The stultifier is not an aged obtuse master who crams his students’ skulls full of poorly digested
knowledge, or a malignant character mouthing half-truths in order to shore up his power and the social
order. On the contrary, he is all the more efficacious because he is knowledgeable, enlightened, and of
good faith. The more he knows, the more evident to him is the distance between his knowledge and the
ignorance of the ignorant ones. The more he is enlightened, the more evident he finds the difference
between groping blindly and searching methodically, the more he will insist on substituting the spirit
for the letter, the clarity of explications for the authority of the book.

The child who recites under the threat of the rod obeys the rod and that’s all: he will apply his
intelligence to something else. But the child who is explained to will devote his intelligence to the work
of grieving: to understanding, that is to say, to understanding that he doesn’t understand unless he is
explained to. He is no longer submitting to the rod, but rather to a hierarchical world of intelligence.

On the contrary, like Descartes, who proved movement by walking, but also like his very royalist and
very religious contemporary Maine de Biran, he considered the fact of a mind at work, acting and

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conscious of its activity, to be more certain than any material thing. And this was what it was all about:
the fact was that his students had learned to speak and to write in French without the aid of explication.
He had communicated nothing to them about his science, no explications of the roots and flexions of
the French language. He hadn’t even proceeded in the fashion of those reformer pedagogues who, like
the preceptor in Rousseau’s Emile, mislead their students the better to guide them, and who cunningly
erect an obstacle course for the students to learn to negotiate themselves.
Tags: unreliable narrator, misleading, lying

14-15

14

The act of learning could be produced according to four variously combined determinations: by an
emancipatory master or by a stultifying one, by a learned master or by an ignorant one.

14-15

Joseph Jacotot applied himself to varying the experiment, to repeating on purpose what chance had
once produced. He began to teach two subjects at which he was notably incompetent: painting and the
piano. Law students would have liked him to be given a vacant chair in their faculty. But the University
of Louvain was already worried about this extravagant lecturer, for whom students were deserting the
magisterial courses, in favor of coming, evenings, to crowd into a much too small room, lit by only two
candles, in order to hear: “I must teach you that I have nothing to teach you.”

[…] Jacotot was experimenting, precisely, with the gap between accreditation and act. Rather than
teaching a law course in French, he taught the students to litigate in Flemish. They litigated very well,
but he still didn’t know Flemish.

15

The experiment seemed to him sufficient to shed light: one can teach what one doesn’t know if the
student is emancipated, that is to say, if he is obliged to use his own intelligence.

To emancipate an ignorant person, one must be, and one need only be, emancipated oneself, that is to
say, conscious of the true power of the human mind. The ignorant person will learn by himself what the
master doesn’t know if the master believes he can and obliges him to realize his capacity: a circle of
power homologous to the circle of powerlessness that ties the student to the explicator of the old
method (to be called from now on, simply, the Old Master). But the relation of forces is very particular.
The circle of powerlessness is always already there: it is the very workings of the social world, hidden
in the evident difference between ignorance and science. The circle of power, on the other hand, can
only take effect by being made public.

16

To the intelligence sleeping in each of us, it would suffice to say: age quod agis, continue to do what
you are doing, “learn the fact, imitate it, know yourself, this is how. nature works.” Methodically repeat
the method of chance that gave you the measure of your power. The same intelligence is at work in all
the acts of the human mind.

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18

Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies.

29-33

29

These are in fact the master’s two fundamental acts. He interrogates, he demands speech, that is to say,
the manifestation of an intelligence that wasn’t aware of itself or that had given up. And he verifies that
the work of the intelligence is done with attention, that the words don’t say just anything in order to
escape from the constraint. Is a highly skilled, very learned master necessary to perform this? On the
contrary, the learned master’s science makes it very difficult for him not to spoil the method. He knows
the response, and his questions lead the student to it naturally. This is the secret of good masters:
through their questions, they discreetly guide the student’s intelligence— discreetly enough to make it
work, but not to the point of leaving it to itself. There is a Socrates sleeping in every explicator.

And it must be very clear how the Jacotot method— that is to say, the student’s method— differs
radically from the method of the Socratic master. Through his interrogations, Socrates leads Meno’s
slave to recognize the mathematical truths that lie within himself. This may be the path to learning, but
it is in no way a path to emancipation. On the contrary, Socrates must take the slave by his hand so that
the latter can find what is inside himself. The demonstration of his knowledge is just as much the
demonstration of his powerlessness: he will never walk by himself, unless it is to illustrate the master’s
lesson. In this case, Socrates interrogates a slave who is destined to remain one.

29-30

The Socratic method is thus a perfected form of stultification. Like all learned masters, Socrates
interrogates in order to instruct. But whoever wishes to emancipate someone must interrogate him in
the manner of men and not in the manner of scholars, in order to be instructed, not to instruct. And that
can only be performed by someone who effectively knows no more than the student, who has never
made the voyage before him: the ignorant master.

30

Granted, replies the critic. But that which makes the interrogator forceful also makes him incompetent
as a verifier. […] Won’t the ignorant master and the ignorant student be playing out the fable of the
blind man leading the blind?

31

The ignorant one himself will do less and more at the same time. He will not verify what the student
has found; he will verify that the student has searched.

33

This is the way that the ignorant master can instruct the learned one as well as the ignorant one: by
verifying that he is always searching. Whoever looks always finds. He doesn’t necessarily find what he
was looking for, and even less what he was supposed to find. But he finds something new to relate to
the thing that he already knows. […] The master is he who keeps the researcher on his own route, the
one that he alone is following and keeps following.

Still, to verify this kind of research, one must know what seeking or researching means. And this is the

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heart of the method. To emancipate someone else, one must be emancipated oneself. One must know
oneself to be a voyager of the mind, similar to all other voyagers: an intellectual subject participating in
the power common to intellectual beings. How does one accede to this self-knowledge? “A peasant, an
artisan (father of a family), will be intellectually emancipated if he thinks about what he is and what he
does in the social order.”

36

The whole practice of universal teaching is summed up in the question: what do you think about it? Its
whole power lies in the consciousness of emancipation that it realizes in the master and gives birth to in
the student.

[…]

The consciousness of emancipation is above all the inventory of the ignorant one’s intellectual
capabilities. He knows his language. He also knows how to use it to protest against his state or to
interrogate those who know, or who believe they know, more than he knows. He knows his trade, his
tools, and their uses; he would be able to perfect them if need be. He must begin to reflect on his
abilities and on the manner in which he acquired them.

any human work of art is the practice of the same intellectual potential. In all cases, it is a question of
observing, comparing, and combining, of making and noticing how one has done it.

36-37

What is possible is reflection: that return to oneself that is not pure contemplation but rather an
unconditional attention to one’s intellectual acts, to the route they follow and to the possibility of
always moving forward by bringing to bear the same intelligence on the conquest of new territories.

38

And the privilege that the Jacotot method gave to the book, to the manipulation of signs, to
mnemotechnics, was the exact reversal of the hierarchy of minds that was designated in Plato by the
critique of writing. The book seals the new relation between two ignorant people who recognize each
other from that point on as intelligent beings.

64-67

64

We know that improvisation is one of the canonical exercises of universal teaching. But it is first of all
the exercise of our intelligence’s leading virtue: the poetic virtue. The impossibility of our saying the
truth, even when we feel it, makes us speak as poets, makes us tell the story of our mind’s adventures
and verify that they are understood by other adventurers, makes us communicate our feelings and see
them shared by other feeling beings. Improvisation is the exercise by which the human being knows
himself and is confirmed in his nature as a reasonable man, that is to say, as an animal “who makes
words, figures, and comparisons, to tell the story of what he thinks to those like him.”

65

The virtue of our intelligence is less in knowing than in doing. “ Knowing is nothing, doing is
everything.” But this doing is fundamentally an act of communication. And, for that, “speaking is the

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best proof of the capacity to do whatever it is.” In the act of speaking, man doesn’t transmit his
knowledge, he makes poetry; he translates and invites others to do the same. He communicates as an
artisan: as a person who handles words like tools. Man communicates with man through the works of
his hands just as through the words of his speech: “ When man acts on matter, the body’s adventures
become the story of the mind’s adventures.” And the artisan’s emancipation is first the regaining of that
story, the consciousness that one’s material activity is of the nature of discourse. He communicates as a
poet: as a being who believes his thought communicable, his emotions sharable. That is why speech
and the conception of all works as discourse are, according to universal teaching’s logic, a prerequisite
to any learning. The artisan must speak about his works in order to be emancipated; the student must
speak about the art he wants to learn. “Speaking about human works is the way to know human art.”

66-67

Undoubtedly, there’s a great distance from this to making masterpieces. The visitors who appreciated
the literary compositions of Jacotot’s students often made a wry face at their paintings and drawings.
But it’s not a matter of making great painters; it’s a matter of making the emancipated: people capable
of saying, “ me too, I’m a painter,” a statement that contains nothing in the way of pride, only the
reasonable feeling of power that belongs to any reasonable being. “There is no pride in saying out loud:
Me too, I’m a painter! Pride consists in saying softly to others: You neither, you aren’t a painter.” “Me
too, I’m a painter” means: me too, I have a soul, I have feelings to communicate to my fellow-men.

136

Panecastic Philosophy

[Panecastic philosophy means that] in each intellectual manifestation, there is a totality of human
intelligence. The panecastician is a lover of discourse, like the mischievous Socrates and the naïve
Phaedrus. But unlike Plato’s protagonists, he doesn’t recognize any hierarchy among orators or
discourses. What interests him is, on the contrary, looking for their equality. He doesn’t expect truth
from any discourse. Truth is felt and not spoken. It furnishes a rule governing the speaker’s conduct,
but it will never be manifested in his sentences. Nor does the panecastian judge the morality of a
discourse. The morality that counts for him is the one that presides over the act of speaking and writing,
that of the intention to communicate, of recognizing the other as an intellectual subject capable of
understanding what another intellectual subject wants to say to him. The panecastician is interested in
all discourses, in every intellectual manifestation, to a unique end: to verify that they put the same
intelligence to work, to verify, by translating the one into the other, the equality of intelligence.

138-139

138

Seek the truth and you will not find it, knock at its door and it will not open to you, but that search will
serve you in learning to do. . . . Stop drinking at that fountain, but don’t, for all that, stop trying to
drink. . . . Come and we will make our poetry. Long live the panecastic philosophy! It’s a storyteller
who never runs out of stories. It gives itself over to the pleasure of the imagination without having to
settle accounts with the truth. It sees that veiled figure only beneath the travesties that hide it. It is
content to see those masks, to analyze them, without being tormented by the countenance underneath.
The Old Master is never content. He lifts up a mask, rejoices, but his joy doesn’t last long; he soon
perceives that the mask he has taken off covers another one, and so on until the end of all truth-seekers.
The lifting of those superimposed masks is what we call the history of philosophy. Oh! the beautiful
history! I like the panecastic stories better.

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(Joseph Jacotot quoted in Rancière)

139

[…] teaching should be founded on the maxim “Know yourself.”

The Founder had predicted it all: universal teaching wouldn’t take. He had also added that it would not
perish.

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