The Ignorant Schoolmaster

The Ignorant Schoolmaster Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation The Ignorant Schoolmaster Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation J Jacques Rancière Translated, with an Introduction, by Kristin Ross Stanford University Press (Γ Stanford, California |1 n Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rancière Jacques. (Maître ignorant. English} The ignorant schoolmaster / Jacques Rancière ; translated, with an introduction, by Kristin Ross, p. cm. Translation of: Le maître ignorant. ISBN 0-8047-1874-1 (cl.) : ISBN 0-8047-1969-1 (pbk.) i . Jacotot, Jean-Joseph, 1770-1840. 2. Educators— France— Biography. 3. Education— Philosophy. 4. Education— France— Parent participation. I. Title. LB675.J242R3613 1991 370 '. i —dc20 90-26745 CIP © This book is printed on acid-free paper. Original printing 1991 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 07 Contents Translator’s Introduction vii Bourdieu and the New Sociology, ix. Pedagogical Reforms, xii. The Lesson of Althusser, xv. The Practice of Equality, xviii. An Intellectual Adventure i The Explicative Order, 4. Chance and Will, 8. The Emancipatory Master, 12. The Circle of Power, 15. The Ignorant One’s Lesson 19 The Island of the Book, 20. Calypso and the Lock smith, 25. The Master and Socrates, 29. The Power of the Ignorant, 31. To Each His Own, 33. The Blind Man and His Dog, 39. Everything Is in Everything, 41 - Reason Between Equals 45 Of Brains and Leaves, 46. An Attentive Animal, 50. A Will Served by an Intelligence, 54. The Principle of Veracity, 57. Reason and Language, 60. Me Too, I’m a Painter!, 65. The Poets’ Lesson, 67. The Community of Equals, 71. The Society of Contempt 75 The Law of Gravity, 76. Inequality’s Passion, 80. Rhetorical Madness, 83. The Superior Inferiors, 86. The Philosopher-King and the Sovereign People, 89. How to Rave Reasonably, 91. The Speech on the Aventine, 96. The Emancipator and His Monkey 101 Emancipatory Method and Social Method, 102. Eman cipation of Men and Instruction of the People, 106. Men of Progress, 109. Of Sheep and Men, 113. The Progressives’ Circle, 117. On the Heads of the People, 122. The Triumph of the Old Master, 127. Society Pedagogicized, 130. The Panecastic’s Stories, 135. Emancipation’s Tomb, 138. Notes 143 Translator s Introduction In The Ignorant Schoolmaster Jacques Rancière re counts the story of Joseph Jacotot, a schoolteacher driven into exile during the Restoration who allowed that experience to fer ment into a method for showing illiterate parents how they themselves could teach their children how to read. That Jaco tot’s story might have something to do with the post-1968 de bates about education in France was not immediately apparent to most of the book’s readers when it appeared in 1987. How could the experiences of a man who had lived all the great peda gogical adventures of the French Revolution, whose own uto pian teaching methods knew a brief— if worldwide and per fectly serious— flurry of attention before passing rapidly into the oblivion Rancière’s book rescues them from— how could these experiences “communicate” with administrators face to face with the problems of educating immigrant North African children in Paris, or with intellectuals intent on mapping the French school system’s continued reproduction of social ine qualities? Rancière’s book explained nothing about the failures of the school system;* it entered directly into none of the con- #French journalism of the i9 8 o ’s spoke frequently about “ l’échec de l’école” ; this failure was usually certified by comparing the percentage of French students who attain the baccalauréat (30 percent in 1985) with the percentage of high school graduates in Japan (75 percent) and the United States (85.6 percent). Given the advanced nature of the French bac— it includes somerhing like two years of what Americans view as college-level work— these statistics perhaps temporary polemical debates. Its polemics, dramatically re counted in the second half of the book, were rather those of the era of the ignorant schoolmaster, Joseph Jacotot: the effects of Jacotot’s unusual method; its fate at the hands of the reformers and pedagogical institutions it undermined; its effacement by the educational policies put into effect, under the auspices of François Guizot and Victor Cousin, by the July Monarchy dur ing the 1830s. The names of the most listened-to theoretical voices on post-’68 education— those of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Milner— are not mentioned by Rancière. Yet the book’s subject was obviously education. Key words like “les sons” and “ intellectual,” “ ignorant” and “schoolmaster” ap peared, if in a somewhat paradoxical arrangement, in its title. And education was again, in the 1980 s, under scrutiny in France. Readers in France had difficulty situating the book, as they have had difficulty, generally speaking, keeping up with the maverick intellectual itinerary of its author. For although in 1965, Rancière published Lire le capital with his teacher Louis Althusser, he was better known for his celebrated leftist critique of his coauthor, La Leçon dfAlthusser (1974), and for the journal he founded the same year, Révoltes logiques. Trained as a philos opher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, but immersed rather unfashionably since 1974 in early-nineteenth- century workers’ archives, Rancière wrote books that eluded classification— books that gave voice to the wild journals of ar tisans, to the daydreams of anonymous thinkers, to worker- poets and philosophers who devised emancipatory systems alone, in the semi-unreal space/time of the scattered late-night moments their work schedules allowed them.1 Were these books primarily history? The philosophy of history? The history of philosophy? Some readers took Le Maître ignorant to be a frag ment of anecdotal history, a curiosity piece, an archival oddity. indicate the elite nature of French schooling, its system of professional and vocational ‘ track ing.” From nearly a quarter to a third of working-class and rural students fail the preparatory course for the bac> against under 3 percent for those from professional families. Educators read it— some quite anxiously, given Jacotot’s affir mation that anyone can learn alone— in the imperative, as a contemporary prescriptive, a kind of suicidal pedagogical how to. A few reviewers read it on the level at which it might, I think, most immediately address an American or British read ership only beginning to come to terms with the legacies of a decade of Reaganism and Thatcherism: as an essay, or perhaps a fable or parable, that enacts an extraordinary philosophical meditation on equality. Bourdieu and the New Sociology The singular history of each national collectivity plays a con siderable role in the problems of education. Though the English translation appears in very different conditions,* it may be use ful to begin by discussing the book’s French context, a context still profoundly marked by the turbulence of the student up risings of May ’68 and by the confusions and disappointments, the reversals and desertions, of the decade that followed: the all but total collapse of the Parisian intelligentsia of the Left, the “end of politics” amid the triumph of sociology. For it was perhaps as a reaction to the unexpectedness of the May uprisings that the 1970’s favored the elaboration of a num ber of social seismologies and above all energized sociological reflection itself: the criticism of institutions and superstruc tures, of the multiform power of domination. In the wake of the political failure of ’68, the social sciences awoke to the study of power: to the New Philosophers’ self-promotional media takeover, to Michel Foucault, but most importantly, perhaps, to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu— the enormous influence of whose work would, given the time lag and ideology of trans lation, begin in earnest in the English-speaking world only in the early 1980’s. No less than the New Philosophers, Bourdieu •In the United States today, for example, arguments about equality invariably turn on the subject of race— not surprisingly in the only major industrial nation built on a legacy of do mestic slavery. could be said to have profited from both the success and the fail ure of the May movement, the first granting his work the energy and posture of critique, the second reinforcing in it the gravi tational pull of structure. If Bourdieu’s work had little serious impact on methodolog ical debates among professional sociologists, its effect on his torians, anthropologists, professors of French, educational re formers, art historians, ghetto high school teachers, and pop ular journalists was widespread. In the introduction to L’Empire du sociologue (1984), a collection of essays edited by Rancière and the Révoltes logiques collective, the authors attrib ute the extraordinary success of Bourdieu’s themes of repro duction and distinction— the phenomenon of their being, so to speak, in everyone’s head— to the simple fact that they worked, which is to say that they offered the most thorough philosophy of the social, the one that best explained to the most people the theoretical and political signification of the last twenty years of their lives. Bourdieu had produced, in other words, a discourse entirely in keeping with his time, a time that com bined, in the words of the editors, “ the orphaned fervor of de nouncing the system with the disenchanted certitude of its per petuity.”2 Before May 1968, steeped in the theoretical and political at mosphere of the Althusserian battle for revolutionary science against ideology, Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron published Les Héritiers (1964), an analysis of the University that helped fuel the denunciation of the institution by showing it to be en tirely absorbed in the reproduction of unequal social structures.

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