The Ignorant Schoolmaster

This is truly an amazing book. Never before have I read and understood such a refreshing and revolutionary approach to education and intelligence. If Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom is about intelligence from the viewpoint of machines, The Ignorant Schoolmaster is about human and humane intelligence.

One-way lectures and punishment for exploring hard to acquire knowledge were always ideas I was against. But what I hadn't considered before reading this book was that, actually, it's explanations that make people feel stupid. Or, as this book calls it: explications that stultify. Teachers who explain are the ones who enslave and subjugate because they imply it's their higher intelligence that allows them to understand and everybody else not to. I've certainly been guilty of offering explanations all my life, with the Socratic method (the worst of all according to Jacques) showing me the way. I've felt there was something problematic there—but I hadn't dared to make the truly radical thought that it was the nature of explaining that was problematic.

Jacques Rancière (just like Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society) convincingly argues against knowledge-based superiority and in favour of intellectual emancipation. Equality is not a goal, he says, it's where we start from:

But the belief in intellectual inequality and in the superiority of one’s own intelligence does not belong to scholars and dis­tinguished poets alone. Its force comes from the fact that it embraces the entire population under the guise of humility. I can’t, the ignorant one you are encouraging to teach himself declares; I am only a worker. Listen carefully to everything there is in that syllogism. First of all, “I can’t” means “I don't want to; why would I make the effort?” Which also means: I un­doubtedly could, for I am intelligent. But I am a worker: people like me can’t; my neighbor can’t. And what use would it be for me, since I have to deal with imbeciles?

I'm baffled by this text and how often it floats around spaces filled with "radical pedagogues," how often it's cited as something that has shown people what they didn't know. That's fine. I'm not against texts that make people aware of something, nor am I against people finding something in places where I do not.

But this book is baffling. Its construction is confusing, and much of it feels apocryphal while told as fact. It swims between multiple perspectives without really claiming any beyond seeking to reform the school system, and that's the part I take most issue with. It is a reformist text, seeking to make it clear that what we're doing is wrong but not so completely wrong that we can't salvage it. At best, I think it was misguided when it was published, and its philosophical discussions have been outdated since before then.

I also cannot figure out for whom this book is written. Who is the audience? What is its purpose? Either I struggle to ascertain that or it has done little to be clear. Is it the fault of the translation? I'll never know, as my French is poor.

What I do know is that all of the chapters could be boiled down to a paragraph. This could have been a pamphlet rather than a book, and it probably would've made more sense than building things as they had been done. I like thinking about what I'm reading and building connections, but this was constructed to be intentionally obtuse in nature.

In short, it feels and reads like academic wankery.

Edit: Also, as someone who as routinely worked with children with whom I share no common verbal language, the fact that I've seen so many people cling to this idea that Jacotot's students were able to achieve fluency "in mere months" is beyond me because that is a lot of work. Nowhere does Rancière even engage with the possibility that these Flemish guys who didn't speak a word of French... could have spoken at least some French and had some basic linguistic capability or possibly had another similar language to pull from! Or an interest prior to meeting Jacotot. None of this is addressed or considered, while Rancière simply claims this as fact (which we cannot really prove or disprove).

It's this constant focus on one person to be the one hero, which Jacotot is not. Learning is a community practice where people bring in ranges of knowledge, and these sorts of philosophy books perpetually hyper-individualise them even when they don't intend to.