Emancipatory Education pt.2

Skirting around the Issue posted on June 8th represented an attempt to explore my distrust of the discourses surrounding ‘Global Citizenship’ through a brief description and problematisation of Paulo Freire’s conception of emancipatory education. This post, while it doesn’t mention Paulo Freire explicitly, nevertheless continues in the same vein in that it is an attempt to explore an alternative to the Freire model of critical pedagogy.

Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster tells the story of Joseph Jacotot – a revolutionary forced into exile in 1818 following the restoration of the monarchy after the French revolution – who settles in Flanders as a teacher of French literature. Joseph Jacotot could not speak Flemish, and his students knew no French, and in an attempt to establish “the minimal link of a thing in common (…) between himself and them” (Rancière, 1991) Jacotot chose as the class text a bilingual edition of Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699). Jacotot sets his students the task of writing a paper in French on Telemachus, and while his initial expectations of his students’ ability to perform this task were low, he was eventually astounded by the excellent quality of their production.

He had given no explanation to his “students” on the first elements of the language. He had not explained spelling or conjugations to them. They had looked for the French words that corresponded to words they knew and the reasons for their grammatical endings by themselves. They had learned to put them together to make, in turn, French sentences by themselves: sentences whose spelling and grammar became more and more exact as they progressed through the book… (Rancière, 1991, p.4)

The conclusion Jacotot draws from this experience is the “principle of the equality of all speaking beings” (p.39). All human beings, while equally intelligent, are nonetheless distinguished by varying degrees of attention. The role of an emancipatory teacher is not to transmit knowledge that the students do not possess, but to motivate students “to attend to their work so that their equal intelligence will have an opportunity to find expression” (May, 2008, p.57). Joseph Jacotot’s insight is that we need to overturn the logic of the explicative system so deeply entrenched in our education systems. It is worth quoting Rancière (1991) on this point:

Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before being 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. (p.6)

Emancipatory education is therefore performative in that it proceeds from the premise that all students are equal. This founding premise can only be attained by a truly emancipated ‘teacher’:

Essentially, what an emancipated person can do is be an emancipator: to give, not the key to knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself. (Rancière, 1991, p.39)

Of course, for those of us who spend a large chunk of our time in classrooms with students, the assertion that all people are equally intelligent sounds optimistic, if not delusional. However, it is important to stress that ‘equality of intelligence’ here does not refer to an equal ability to attain an A grade at GCSE or A’ level in English or Mathematics, or that everyone is equally capable of formulating the theory of relativity. Equality of intelligence, according to Rancière, refers to the ability of all people to speak to and reason with one another. Rancière therefore privileges the linguistic nature of the intellect and equality is that of speech and reason (May, 2008)

It is this performative presupposition of equality that founds democratic politics and I believe it is here that we can draw a link between Rancière and Badiou’s assertion that ‘there is only one world’ (see previous post).

Bibliography:

May, T. (2008). The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rancière, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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