The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Rancière

In one of his most influential books, Jacques Rancière tells the remarkable story of the "ignorant schoolmaster" to open the question of what he calls "universal teaching." At a time of political crisis a French academic named Jacques Jacotot was forced into exile, and he left his teaching post in Dijon to take up another in the Netherlands. Many of the students who wanted to be taught by him were unable to speak French and he was unable to speak Flemish, so the situation was perplexing. His solution was novel. He found that "[t] here was … no language in which he could teach them what they sought from him," and '[y]et he wanted to respond to their wishes" (1-2); their desire to learn. Jacotot decided to improvise by establishing what Rancière calls "the minimal link of a thing in common" between himself and the students" (2), a link he secured through the use of a novel, written in French, with a parallel translation in Flemish. And what he found was that by reading the book carefully in Flemish, and studying the French, his students were able to decipher the text in French and to learn that language, decipher its grammar and understand something of its meanings. Rancière uses the story of Jacotot to question the role of explication in teaching. He writes:
Like all conscientious professors, [Jacotot] knew that teaching was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equaly well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex. (3)
Rancière writes that the experiment with his Flemish students made this model less than persuasive; without explanation from him, his students had learned the language they did not know. Explication, it seemed, was not necessarily the source of a student's learning. A parallel arises with the most basic scene of learning we have in common:
The words the child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instruction them, they are almost all – regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color – able to understand and speak the language of their parents. (5)
From this observation, Rancière claims a striking truth; explication in learning is a form of "enforced stultification" (7), always inferior to the style of original learning, the way we learn our mother tongue. This "best" teaching, which harnesses the will to learn in place of acts of instruction, is what he calls "universal teaching," a practice that assumes a level of universal competence among students, competence generated by their desire to learn: "[t]here is no one on earth who hasn't learned something by himself and without a master explicator" (16). As Rancière notes, almost all children success in learning their mother tongue without difficulty, although it is in fact a complex task; the capacity to learn complex things is not a talent segregated on the basis of calculable differences in talent or intelligence, but broadly possessed by all. Jacotot discovers that his students acquire French not through his teaching, but rather through his capacity to direct their own interest.
Rancière, Jacques (1987) Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

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