Introduction

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière (1991) presents a series of five lessons that take up the challenge of “universal teaching” developed by French nineteenth-century teacher and scholar Joseph Jacotot. In his experiences of teaching, Jacotot came to recognize the limitations and contradictions of an explicatory approach to pedagogy. Rancière takes up Jacotot’s concerns. Each lesson works with the problem and idea of intellectual equality, elaborating Rancière’s engagement with politics, aesthetics, the distribution of the sensible, dissensus, and democracy. For teacher education, The Ignorant Schoolmaster presents conditions and relationships to make sense of and to test. In particular, Rancière’s work presents a significant challenge to teacher education in relation to its more or less institutionalized aims and operations.

Explication and Stultification

Rancière (1991) recounts Jacotot’s educational journey in France and Belgium. Jacotot’s observations of teaching, of the task for the teacher, and of the nature of learning lead him to a realization that his own mastery of a subject is not the necessary condition for learning. This observation is particularly evident to Jacotot while teaching in Belgium with students who knew no French, while he, Jacotot, knew no Flemish. He took his observations of student learning as evidence that students can and will teach themselves.

More than this, his observation of teachers and teaching led him to be concerned with the acts of stultification that occurred in particular teacher-learner, expert-novice relationships traditional to the educational project. Jacotot argues that a pedagogy of explication teaches primarily that learning and the learner is dependent on another, expert, master, explicator. Rancière (1991) explains explication as an error that is far more than the will of a mistaken and misused explicatory expert – explication performs a particular function in the social order. In a sense, it is the social order (Bingham and Biesta 2010).

Explication sits within the domain of pedagogy – a pedagogy that regards the learner as an inferior intelligence and for whom a superior intelligence, that of the master explicator, is necessary in order to mature. Jacotot regards the explicative system, and the role of the explicator, as an error. The learner does not need an explicator. More than this, the explicator necessarily creates limitations to learning. An “incapacity to understand” (Rancière 1991, p. 6) is a fiction. The explicator requires that the learner be constructed as incapable and constructs this fiction in the mind of the learner through the very act of explication: “To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before the act of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid” (Rancière 1991, p. 6).

The child, upon learning of their inferiority and their dependence on their intellectual superiors, enters a state of grief and submits to “a hierarchical world of intelligence” (Rancière 1991, p. 8). This inequality or hierarchy stultifies learning and the learner in the interests of maintaining an “indefinitely reproduced mutilation” (Rancière 1991, p. 21) that prescribes and preserves superiority for the master explicator and the explicatory society.

The task of the ignorant teacher and, here, the teacher educator, includes two critical elements. The first and fundamental role of the teacher is the lesson “I must teach you that I have nothing to teach you” (Ranciere 1991, p. 15). A second element here requires the teacher’s attention to the will of the student in relation to the constraints of their situation. The teacher adds their will to that of the student’s in order to amplify the student’s journey – or to address elements of the student’s environment that add to or subtract from this journey.

Rancière (1991, p. 16) explains Jacotot’s approach as universal, and this on account of the belief that there has been, is, and will be “no one on earth” who could not claim memory of this experience of teaching one’s self. Yet the quality of this universal experience appears as a something of a false memory when subjected to the layers of hierarchy in educational systems and the hordes of master explicators churned out by the human sciences (Bingham and Biesta 2010) and particularly teacher education institutions.

Intellectual Equality and Emancipation

Explication deprives the learner of both the experience of and belief in intellectual equality, and hence the critical lesson of the teacher regards the learner’s recognition and experience of their intellectual equality:

The principle of inequality, the old principle, stultifies no matter what one does; the principle of equality, the Jacotot principle, emancipates no matter what procedure, book, or fact it is applied to. (Rancière 1991, p. 28)

Stultification keeps the learner in intellectual chains with the never-ending and never-realized promise of emancipation. The task of the ignorant schoolmaster is in a sense achieved, at least on the grounds of the learning of one’s own intelligence, with the emancipation of the learner who, from that realization, will make their own decisions about what and how to lead their learning. Emancipation can only be emancipatory when that experience is led and enacted without the expertise of an “other” emancipator – an individual to whom there would always be a debt (Bingham and Biesta 2010). Hence, the “problem is to reveal an intelligence to itself” (Rancière 1991, p. 28).

Jacotot took the problem of emancipation to be a matter of dignity afforded to all people (Rancière 1991) and argued that there is no human that cannot engage in the acts of observation, comparison, making, and reflection – these being the acts of the intellect and of the journey of the intelligence. Rancière (1991) explains further that there is a necessary social dimension to the intellectual journey:

Intelligence is not a power of understanding based on comparing knowledge with its object. It is the power to make oneself understood through another’s verification. And only an equal understands an equal. Equality and intelligence are synonymous terms… The equality of intelligence is the common bond of humankind, the necessary and sufficient condition for a society of men to exist. (pp. 72-73, original emphases)

Rancière (1991) also maintains that equality is not a principle but rather a supposition. “The ignorant schoolmaster’s logic poses equality as an axiom to be verified” (Rancière 2010, p. 5). The teacher does not settle into a belief that every child arrives to the class as equals, but rather they are continuously exploring the possibility of this equality of intelligence. In addition, as a supposition rather than a truth, Rancière (1991) proposes that there is no argument to be had with those who would seek to constantly prove otherwise – those who would claim that intelligences are not equal, that some students are naturally more capable than others, and that each and every student requires a teacher who is master of the student’s intellectual journey.

Progress and Educational Institutions

In his concerns with explication, Jacotot critiques the modern progressive movement. Rancière (1991) describes Jacotot as “the only egalitarian to perceive the representation and institutionalization of progress as a renouncing of the moral and intellectual adventure of equality, public instruction as the grief-work of emancipation” (p. 134, original emphasis). Jacotot recognizes that progress in its existential essence aligns well with his ideas on the universal method. Progress involves, productively, activities of exploration and verification and the idea that anyone can find things out for themselves. Through his work with the political leaders of the time, Jacotot experiences progress in its institutional form as an organization of social institutions into the way of explication. “It’s society that perfects itself, that takes perfectibility as the watchword of its order. It’s society that progresses, and a society can only progress socially, that is to say, all together and in good order. Progress is the new way of saying inequality” (Rancière 1991, pp. 118–119, original emphases). An anxiety with regard to progress creates a privilege for the explicators to take up their place as leaders and visionaries to whom others should look for guidance and to whom a society of individuals is indebted.

In this formation, progressive educational institutions attend to the finest details of the best methods of maintaining inequality. A proliferation of progressive pedagogies are designed and enforced to maintain the authority of the explicatory system and to keep secure the integrity of the societal structures. “Every institution is an explication in social act, a dramatization of inequality. Its principle is and always will be antithetical to that of a method based on equality and the refusal of explications. Universal teaching can only be directed to individuals, never to societies” (Rancière 1991, p. 105, original emphasis). In other words, emancipation is not and can never be, for Rancière, a socially programmed experience – emancipation can only occur for individuals, under the guidance of other individuals. This is a revolution that occurs for each individual as an individual who has learned that they can teach themselves. Rancière (1991) takes up the family as the necessary context for universal teaching on account of a perceived intimacy of the family that is lost in the social institutions of education (Rancière 1991). However, the more or less institutionalization of the family, and of the rule of the family through explication (think, for instance, of both the government and non-governmental programs for parenting that proliferate), drags the family into the machinery of societal progress and inscribes in the mind of the parent that one cannot even (and especially) learn to be a parent without the guidance of the master. The family is not free to teach even when the parent is labelled the first teacher by progressive societies.

Hence, a radical difference to Jacotot’s approach to universal teaching is that it was never, and can never be, a method applied to a state education system or, even, to the institution of a lone, alternative, school (Rancière 2010). Jacotot advised the government of the day this much, arguing that “government doesn’t owe people an education, for the simple reason that one doesn’t owe people what they can take for themselves … education is like liberty: it isn’t given; it’s taken” (Rancière 1991, pp. 106–107). Teacher education institutions, for example, generate both inequality and stultification through their organization of the curriculum and through the systems of classification and assessment:

There are hundreds of ways to instruct, and learning also takes place at the stultifiers’ school; a professor is a thing, less easily handled than a book, undoubtedly, but he can be learned: he can be observed, imitated, dissected, put back together; his person, available for observation, can be tested. One always learns when listening to someone speaking. A professor is neither more nor less intelligent than another man, and he generally presents a great quantity of facts for the researcher’s observation. But there is only one way to emancipate. And no party or government, no army, school, or institution, will ever emancipate a single person. (Rancière 1991, p. 102, original emphases)

The production of particular kinds of citizens is not an exercise in emancipation, and the production of those citizens in a school is not emancipatory. Emancipation occurs when the “workings of the social machine” are rejected (Ranciere 1991, p. 108); when, for instance, the teacher educator leaves teacher education to work with families to remind them of the forgotten knowledge of intellectual equality.

Rancière’s (1991) thinking is not a rejection of teacher education, but rather of thinking of teacher education as emancipatory. In addition, Rancière recognizes that teacher education institutions can still work with these ideas. Teacher education can at best then use its position to introduce the ideas and to recognize its own limitations as an institution that serves a particular order, one that maintains a particular order and as such is a mechanism of determining what can and cannot be said and known, by whom, and for what reasons.

Teacher Education and Student Teachers

For teacher education, Rancière’s lessons orient the teacher educator and the student teacher to an idea to discuss, to a proposition to validate, and to an experience to feel. The most significant implication for teacher education of the idea of intellectual equality, evident in Rancière’s work, is that anyone can teach anything on one condition: that condition being their understanding of the intellectual equality of the learner.

The Flemish students learning French can teach themselves, with the right resources, and this includes Jacotot as a resource, in the right context. Jacotot is led to the idea that “one can teach what one doesn’t know” and that the necessary condition for this is an expectation that the student has their own intelligence to drive their learning (Rancière 1991, p. 15). The irony here is that teaching and teacher education have long grappled with the cliché: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. In the twenty-first century, that concept has many implications.

Given a trend in education to think of the teacher as de-centered, it makes sense to hear these words; they fit with a learning society belief in the self-managing learner. On the other hand, in an age of educational accountability, the student as consumer then perhaps inevitably asks:

what need do I have of you?

This question is exactly the question that Rancière is waiting to hear. In its absence, or in waiting to hear its utterance, the task for the teacher educator guided by Jacotot’s method is to “announce to all individuals, to all mothers and fathers, the way to teach what one doesn’t know on the principle of the equality of intelligence” (Rancière 1991, p. 105). That task sits somewhat uncomfortably alongside all of the other lessons for the student teacher. These lessons regarding child development, subject knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, assessment practices, mentoring and professional development, and so on are amplifications of explication. They demand that the student teacher recognize and then reinforce hierarchies of intelligence. This demand is placed on the student through the process of interviewing, testing, and selection for the study of teaching, a process that says: not everyone can learn to teach. On the contrary, the universal method says to the student of teaching: anyone can study teaching.

The student teacher learns, instead, that there is discrimination and inequity in society and that their expertise is necessary to both the recognition and resolution of such differences in socially and culturally mediated educational experiences and outcomes (Rancière 2010). In the sociology of education, particularly in the work of critical theory, this idea of the always-unequal relationships is an abiding theoretical assumption that the student teacher is expected to learn to recognize through the teaching of the teacher educator. The concept of equity is commonly employed in teacher education to guide student teachers in their understanding of the demands upon education and upon teachers to address discrimination and exploitation in and throughout structures and systems.

Teacher education has certainly entertained its role as an instrument of equality and has operated on the grounds of equity of outcomes for societies, attending to the problems of discrimination, exploitation, prejudice, and inequality. Teacher education has long been a site of contestation between competing social and political agendas: teacher educators and education scholars are often criticized for their subversion of technical processes of teacher development with ideals regarding fairness, justice, and democracy. Rancière’s ideas might then have some appeal in these loose affinities. However, Rancière takes a more radical turn that establishes a significant problem for teacher education in its emancipatory program.

Rancière’s analysis of educational institutions identifies the limitations of these lessons for the student teacher. Teacher education hierarchies are significant layers that distribute the hierarchies at the same time as they perform a significant function in establishing a particular discourse of educational progress and the aspiration of equity of educational outcomes for all students and all communities. For teacher education, then, Rancière offers a significant critique – a critique that reveals and challenges the limits of teacher education. Yet, as noted above, even within these limits, Rancière offers something of an approach to refer to in each moment of the shared study of teaching. “What matters … is not that we are committed to equality, democracy and emancipation, but how we are committed to it and how we express and articulate this commitment” (Bingham and Biesta 2010, p. 45, original emphases).

The how of this commitment might be expressed when student teachers show a willingness to teach themselves to teach, and in learning to teach, they are recognizing that their experience of intellectual equality might be a central lesson to share in their future classrooms, lecture theaters, and early childhood centers and, most importantly at the same time, outside of these institutional spaces.