Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Studying Teaching

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...