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“An extremely provocative, original, and engaging book, it raises questions of great relevance and urgency about the process of cultural selection and canonization.”–Denis Hollier, Yale University
Ingram
This extraordinary book can be read on several levels. Primarily, it is the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiled French schoolteacher who discovered in 1818 an unconventional teaching method that spread panic throughout the learned community of Europe.
Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who know no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn. The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all people were equally intelligent. From this postulate, Jacotot devised a philosophy and a method for what he called "intellectual emancipation"--a method that would allow, for instance, illiterate parents to themselves teach their children how to read. The greater part of the book is devoted to a description and analysis of Jacotot's method, its premises, and (perhaps most important) its implications for understanding both the learning process and the emancipation that results when that most subtle of hierarchies, intelligence, is overturned.
The book, as Kristin Ross argues in her introduction, has profound implications for the ongoing debate about education and class in France that has raged since the student riots of 1968, and it affords Ranciere an opportunity (albeit indirectly) to attack the influential educational and sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (and others) that Ranciere sees as perpetuating inequality.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Astonishing work: a manifesto for pedagogy and politics, Aug 6 2004
By Anonymous - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Paperback)
I'm constantly amazed that more people haven't read this book, or even heard of it; it should be considered among the new classics of Continental political thought.
Rancière's text does several things at once: most simply, it tells the story of the eighteenth-century revolutionary pedagogue Joseph Jacotot, who developed a method of "panecastic" education which he considered the universal route to mental emancipation. But at the same time Rancière resurrects Jacotot's doctrine. Through a marvelous, sustained sleight-of-hand Rancière plays with its tone and narrative voice, this whole book works as a twentieth-century political manifesto at the same time as a work of history. It is radically egalitarian -- in fact, after reading the book I am not sure that anyone other than Jacotot and Rancière has fully understood the meaning of real, radical egalitarianism. And it is a real book on teaching, all the same, as part of its goal is to evangelize "panecastic" teaching and summarize this general method for teaching.
Not to take anything away from Rancière's other important work, which also deserves more exposure, but this book is incredible, maybe his best, and should be read by a much wider audience.
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Knowing is half the battle...the other half is Ignorance..., Mar 8 2009
By Lost Lacanian - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Paperback)
I want to add my voice to the other two reviews. I also want to register my amazement that this book remains in relative obscurity.
Ranciere's Ignorant Schoolmaster is a serious philosophical work on the question of education and pedagogy that explores the connection between education and emancipatory politics. As a serious work of philosophy, it is rigorous and a quite demanding read. However, it advances an elegant thesis: all intelligences are equal. Thus, the intellectual emancipation of the students occurs when the holder of knowledge, the teacher, claims ignorance.
This book is made more important due to the lack of real books on the philosophy of education. The last serious book was Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written in the late sixties--a book with which Ranciere's has much affinity. It is strange that education has been drained of philosophy. Especially since Plato saw it as the key to maintain order in the Republic. Perhaps, philosophical thought on education represents a real danger to the powers that be, so much so that they systematically separated it from philosophy.
On a personal note. I teach Ranciere's book at the University where I am at. You could not believe the amount of controversey it stirs every time. Students, young and old, refuse to accept Ranciere's thesis that all intelligences are equal. They hold fast to the notion that some minds are superior. On a brighter note, one student admitted to me that he decided not to become a teacher because of this book.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mind expanding, Nov 3 2010
By Book lover - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Paperback)
This books gets you thinking hard about perspectives in education. Makes you question everything you believe about education.
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