The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (A Review)

Introduction

Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons In Intellectual Emancipation is difficult to categorize. Reminiscent of certain work of Michel Serres and other post-deconstruction French philosophers, Rancière is more interested in creatively orienting the reader toward their own thought and humanity than in presenting a unified philosophical argument. He begins with a seemingly forgettable curiosity in the history of French pedagogy where Joseph Jacotot taught Flemish students French with nothing but a single French text and a complete ignorance of the Flemish language. Across five essays, he extrapolates Jacotot’s method of “universal teaching,” that is, helping students to recognize their intellectual equality without the explication of “knowledgeable” teacher.

To say the book is about teaching, however, translates only a fragment of Rancière’s inquiry, which dances across topics as seemingly disperse as the history of Western philosophy and rhetoric; social inequality and class-systems; the fiction of progressive rationality; and the “secret of genius” that any student can achieve through an emancipated self-directed inquiry.

It’s helpful to know that this is not a book to be picked up on Friday to develop a lesson plan for Monday. It is a philosophy of pedagogy. That much is true. But Rancière is not only disinterested in helping teachers better deliver material to their students; he is critical of teaching through transmission, referred to throughout the book as explication, entirely.

Explication and Emancipation

Explication refers to any teaching style that assumes knowledge is “held” by the teacher which the student must, based on the teacher’s interventions of one sort or another, approximate and thereby “learn.” The problem with this method, for Rancière, is the inequality created, an “enforced stultification” that renders the student definitionally incapable of ever catching up to the teacher (7, 8). He writes:

There is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another. A person–and a child in particular–may need a master when his own will is not strong enough to set him on track and keep him there. But that subjection is purely one of will over will. It becomes stultification when it links an intelligence to another intelligence. . . . We will call the known and maintained difference of the two revelations–the act of an intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will–emancipation. (13)

There are multiple problems with explication. On one hand, it creates a division between the supposedly superior and inferior intelligences of the teacher and student, denying the student a full recognition of their intellectual power that is equally shared across all humans. Additionally, it produces the academic tendency to separate the intelligence of the working class and the academic class, rationalizing and supporting social division (37).

The alternative is termed emancipation. In this model, the “ignorant” teacher holds no special knowledge, and indeed will often teach what they themselves do not know. Instead, the teacher’s role is to oblige and authorize students to realize their capabilities of self-learning through the mediating force of a shared text (a “thing in common”), not to explicate material for them (15). Put another way, teachers emancipate by creating conditions for students to immerse themselves in a “thing in common” and by asking them to share, though their own language, what they know. The only necessary intervention is to verify that the student has earnestly and intellectually engaged in a process of self-learning, not to transmit material to them (31).

Understanding, from this view, isn’t a goal but an inherent capability. The student must realize that knowledge is always and only ever a process of ongoing translation through the repetition and reworking of the “thing in common” through language.

There was only one rule: [the student] must be able to show, in the book, the materiality of everything he says. He will be asked to write compositions and perform improvisations under the same conditions: he must use the words and turns of phrase in the book to construct his sentences; he must show, in the book, the facts on which his reasoning is based. In short, the master must be able to verify in the book the materiality of everything the student says. (20)

Everyone is equally intelligent, and that intelligence can be emancipated through willful repetition, by “learning, repeating, imitating, translating, taking apart, putting back together” (55, 68). Again, these seemingly practical recommendations are made complex by the fact that any attempt to “lead” the student to a predetermined conclusion—even using a supposedly Socratic method (29, 58)—falls back into explication and reproduces a superiority/inferiority of intellect.

On Rhetoric and the US University

Rancière’s argument is expansive—more so, at least, than its slim pages suggest. I want to touch on just one other element, which is Rancière’s critique of rhetoric. Throughout the book, Ranciére describes rhetoric as a tool not for “figur[ing] out” but for “be[ing] listened to” (68). He refers to rhetoric, from this perspective, as “the art of reasoning that tries to annihilate reason under the guise of reason” and as a perverted poetry (83-84). Elsewhere, he writes “Rhetoric is speech in revolt against the poetic condition of the speaking being. It speaks in order to silence. You will speak no longer, you will think no longer, you will do this: That is it’s program” (85).

Let me be clear: If I agreed with this critique entirely, I would be a very uncomfortable teacher of rhetoric and writing courses, and I would be very sad about my wasted time earning a Ph.D. Jaded as I am, I still believe that rhetorical inquiry serves a purpose beyond the application and maintenance of power.

Yet. Rancière’s critique of rhetoric does feel uncomfortably salient and more relevant than I would like. Due to political and economic realities, the field of English has for some time been largely rebranded in terms of job preparation and who will be the best operators of communications technology. In this shifting context, it seems as though rhetoric, composition, technical communication, and all of the related disciplines focusing on “real world” communication have gained purchase. In this movement, the value of language study has been largely reframed into various versions of the idea that the professional world needs better communicators—that is, better explicators.

There’s nothing wrong with (or, maybe, no way to avoid) this idea as a part of rhetorical study and a piece of the larger pie of higher education. But what do we lose when the material conditions of education make it less and less feasible to give students a book and to honestly, earnestly ask them what they think, as equals?

Rancière concludes the book with an essay on the impossibility of institutionalizing universal teaching and closes with the following line: “The Founder (Jacotot) had predicted it all: universal teaching wouldn’t take. He also added that it would not perish” (139).

Works Cited

Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Translated by Kristin Ross, Stanford UP, 1991.