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?