For Happy Friends Reading Club’s next reading, to be discussed Saturday November 5th at 5pm, a selection has been proposed from “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” by Jacques Rancière (1991). It takes up the issue of educational models with its historical account of the Enlightenment educator Joseph Jacotot (4 March 1770 – 30 July 1840), a French teacher and educational philosopher, creator of the method of “intellectual emancipation.” [wikipedia].

We will discuss chapter 3, and the translator’s introduction is also suggested if you have time.

Pedagogy is a field that obviously has implications beyond itself, to the heart of the reproduction of society and its forms:

“All people are equally intelligent. This is Jacotot’s startling (or naive?) presupposition, his lesson in intellectual emancipation. And from this starting point (the result of an accidental discovery occasioned by the peculiar circumstances of exile), Jacotot came to realize that knowledge is not necessary to teaching, nor explication necessary to learning. “Explication,” he writes, “is the myth of pedagogy.” Rather than eliminating incapacity, explication, in fact, creates it. It does this in part by establishing the temporal structure of delay (“a little further along,” “a little later,” “a few more explanations and you’ll see the light”) that, writ large, would become the whole nineteenth-century myth of Progress: “the pedagogical fiction erected into the fiction of the whole society,” and the general infantilization of the individuals who compose it. The pedagogical myth divides the world into two: the knowing and the ignorant, the mature and the unformed, the capable and the incapable. By the second half of The lgnorant Schoolmaster, the homology of delay that links the popular classes, the child, and the poor within the discourse of the republican “Men of Progress” surrounding Jacotot is all too clear.”

(From translator’s introduction)

[Paper version available at HomeShop from Monday, October 24th; please indicate whether you would like to pick one up if desired.]