Reflections on intellectual emancipation from Jacques Rancière's “The ignorant schoolmaster”

Abstract

The dissonance experienced by the French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot in 1818 and collected by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster in 1987, could be considered not only as the proposal of a new educational paradigm or the criticism of some pedagogical models, but also as an invitation to think the notion of 'emancipation' and to examine further assumptions in some theories of emancipation. Accepting this challenge by Rancière and Jacotot, this article pursues a double aim: on the one hand, I present Rancière's critique against the dominant form in which emancipation has been thought; on the other hand, I evince two aspects that, according to Rancière, are crucial in the emancipatory process.