This book 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.

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