The book that seems most immediately relevant to
educationalists The Ignorant
Schoolmaster (Rancière 1991) concerns the
activities and principles of Joseph Jacotot, an
educationalist in Belgium and France in the 1830s.
[see my notes and comments on the book here]
Rancière merges his voice with that of Jacotot in
an interesting way, which is discussed later [see
my notes on Rancière
and Foucault] . Jacotot/Rancière faced a
particular problem during his tenure at the
University of Louvain (it might be worth noting
immediately that Jacotot was never a simple
schoolmaster, but rather a professor at an elite
university). He and the students had no
shared language, and Jacotot began by giving them
a popular classic text published in both French
and Dutch. Students had to teach themselves
French by memorizing this text, page by page,
comparing the words in the different versions, and
learning French vocabulary by rote. To his
surprise, apparently, Jacotot found that
students were able to develop fluency in French
using this method. A number of outsiders,
including senior academics, were invited to
examine student work, and set tests like asking
students to write something then comment on and
extend the texts they had read. External assessors
agreed that students had produced work of an
acceptable quality -- although one professor found
a minor error (a missing accent).
Jacotot/Rancière argued that people were perfectly
capable of learning for themselves without the
intervention of the usual skilled pedagogy
consisting of systematic explication.
Indeed, they learned even if pedagogues themselves
knew nothing about the subject. There was a
fundamental equality of intelligence among human
beings of whatever station. In addition, knowledge
could be developed in any direction by a process
of linking the new to what was known
already. Both claims contrast strongly with
those of conventional models which involve skilled
and sequential (‘progressive’ in that sense)
explication. Explication produces permanent
hierarchical relations between teacher and taught,
because the ignorant can never catch up and bridge
the gap between themselves and their teachers
It is already possible to see how this might
interest current British progressive (in a
different sense) educationalists . It looks
like this is another confirmation of the
fundamental intelligence, equality, and creativity
of children. Rancière’s comments about the
ways in which the usual pedagogical approaches
divide students looks like the well established
attack on traditional methods of teaching.
The idea that knowledge can be developed from
making connections between what is known and
unknown can seem like one of the classic defences
of non-disciplinary ‘discovery’ or project – based
pedagogies.
However, Jacotot/Rancière also suggest features
that would not be so popular with modern
progressives. There is a demand that students
undertake rote learning, for example, and be
tested frequently on their knowledge. There are no
excuses for not doing so: rote learning was
boring, for example, but student laziness had to
be countered. When students said they could not do
anything this meant that they could but did not
want to. When students dismissed academic learning
as elitist nonsense, Jacotot pointed out that
their own pride in their common sense or their
practical expertise was also elitist, and, very
often, showed strong contempt for ‘ordinary
people’.
There was initially no real support for a
community dimension in education either, since
social life itself was seen as imposing some
material deadweight on intelligence: ‘the
battlefield is the true portrait of society’
(Rancière 1991: 92). Managerial discourses
were indeed vague, florid and evasive, but,
annoyingly, so was much ordinary speech.
[Rancière/Jacotot cite Bentham on legal language
as a kind of appalling poetry] Lying was not
confined to any one social group.
Finally, Jacotot/Rancière does not deny the need
for teacher authority, but claiming authority on
the basis of expertise is seen as particularly
pernicious. Most current educational thinking
would see it as the only acceptable basis for
authority, of course. Certainly the alternatives
seem undesirable – to cite an old sociological
study, teachers can in practice also claim
authority based on their superior age, social
class, gender or ethnicity, but none of these can
be supported in modern societies. Charismatic
authority is also possible but unpredictable. If
charisma is his secret, it isnot surprising that
Jacotot's ideas could never be established as some
kind of pedagogic school or movement.
Rancière used to be much more critical of the
authority relations in universities as an advocate
of student and worker radicalism during the
‘Events’ surrounding the May 1968 revolts.
French students then would not be prepared to
discuss any basis for the claimed authority of
university hierarchies, and wanted to dismantle
them. Rancière himself once admired Maoist
practice that saw university academics forced to
do manual labour, and to teach subjects in ways
that were radically accessible to the masses,
instead of following the normal scholarly routes
to personal reward (Rancière 1974 [1969]). To be
fair, Rancière withdrew his support later, once he
realized the ‘penitential’ implications. However,
‘equal intelligence’ was originally a Maoist
slogan (Bosteels
2011: 28).
This interest in radical politics, and the later
interest in aesthetics, as well as the work done
on worker movements in the 1830s all point to a
wider context for the work on education.
This is actually recognized very briefly in an
article on Rancière by the influential educational
philosopher Gerd
Biesta (2010: 40): the work on Jacotot and
pedagogy is connected to 'Marxist notions of
ideology and false consciousness', and to
Bourdieu's concept of misrecognition.
However, Biesta does not pursue this critical work
very far, claiming limited time and space.
On Marxism Biesta (2010: 44) refers us instead to
Eagleton’s textbook on ideology and quotes him as
saying:
one of the crucial
insights… is not only that all thought is
socially determined—following Karl Marx's dictum
that "it is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being but, on the contrary,
their social being that determines their
consciousness"—but also, and more importantly,
that ideology is thought "which denies this
determination"
There is also the suspicion of a classic
‘ideological couplet’ (also discussed below, it is s an
Althusserian term) at work when Biesta
contrasts economism with its usual opposite
-- liberal essentialism: ‘the assumption of the
equality of all human beings' (2010: 57).
It is worth saying that Rancière would not read
Marx’s phrase as anything other than a preliminary
polemic , and he suggests that Marx went on to
argue that the classic philosophical conceptions
of materialism and idealism both ’belonged to the
same theoretical configuration’ and need to be
opposed by a new politicized conception of
materialism ‘founded on the human history of
production’ (Rancière 2011: 12—13). Rancière’s own
critique of Marx and Marxism is rather different
as we shall see. Whether Rancière would claim a
general equality is also in doubt considering what
we saw above about Jacotot/Rancière on society as
a battlefield. Biesta includes Bourdieu in his
critique as a kind of weak Marxist, developing a
sociological version of economism and false
consciousness in the form of the concept
‘misrecognition’, but again Rancière’s critique is
different and more sophisticated.
Overall, Rancière’s actual criticisms lead to more
general problems with any attempts to analyze
concrete situations, including liberal ones.
Biesta’s interpretations makes it easier to ally
Rancière with the conventions of liberal
educational philosophy, and possibly with
contemporary departmental politics. None of
this is necessarily intended by Biesta personally,
of course, but abstracting the work of education
from its context in radical politics clearly
offers risks.
The same abstractions affect the final section of
Biesta’s article, when he cites Rancière to
warrant becoming engaged in educational politics.
Biesta advocates dissensus, 'an interruption of
the police order' (2010: 59). It is probable
that he does not mean radical university politics,
of the kind that Rancière once embraced, or even
contemporary forms of student strikes and
occupations, but it is important to specify in
more detail. Without specification a call
for more interest in educational politics could
mean anything, it is suggested below.
Finally, Biesta (2010: 41) suggests that
Rancière’s method is evident in the merging of
voices discussed earlier. This form is to a large
extent consistent with his ideas on emancipation
in that the writing itself tries to avoid a
position of mastery. He refers to this as a
‘‘topographical’’ way of writing that
articulates “an egalitarian or anarchist
theoretical position that does not presuppose this
vertical relationship of top to bottom”.
However, this style is not used in all the other
works, especially the critiques of rival
approaches, so this cannot be the only method.
Instead, Rancière’s method is better grasped as a
kind of ‘deconstruction’ (Reid in Ranciere 2012)
borrowed from Foucault, but pursued initially with
the vigour and black humour of a
soixante-huitard. Biesta notes echoes of
Foucault, of course, and has pursued the relation
in another essay (2008), but he does not explore
the implications for the earlier work. I do though
--here
If we pursue these issues into Rancière’s
actual work, we can see the ways in which it
differs from liberal educational thought. We
will also be better able to engage critically with
it, instead of just revisiting the eternal
struggle between traditional and progressive, a
likely tendency noted in Biesta’s article itself
in a note at the end (Biesta 2010: 59).
References
Biesta, G. 2010. A New Logic of Emancipation:
the Methodology of Jacques Rancière.
Educational Theory, 60(1): 39 -59.
Bosteels,B.
2011 Reviewing Rancière. Or, the persistence of
discrepancies. Radical Philosophy 170:
25--31.
Rancière, J. 1991. The Ignorant
Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation, trans and with an intro by
Kristin Ross, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rancière, J. 2012 [1983] Proletarian Nights: The
Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France .
London: Verso.