Teaching game for understanding

1. Emancipatory Education
The Ignorant Schoolmaster
Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
(Jacques Ranciere) (Ranciere, 1987)

2. Background
• Ranciere retells a story of Joseph Jacotot, who was a
lecturer in French literature at the University of Louvain in
Belgium 1818.
• Mainy students who did not speak French; but knew
Flemish were asked to learn the French text (Felon’s
Novel) with the help of a translator.
• They were required to repeat over and over, to read
through the rest of the book and recite it.
• They successfully wrote in French what they thought they
had read and learned.
• The questions: How could these students understand and
resolve the difficulties of a language entirely new to them
without any explanation? (Ranciere, 1987 as cited in
Citton, 2010 pp. 25-26)

3. Background 2
• Rancière, through Joseph Jacotot’s case-study sought to
rewrite/affirm a method for demonstrating to illiterate
parents how they could teach their children reading.
• Argues that even the illiterate can help learners read.
• The ignorant can create environments that can make
others read, hence the title ‘Ignorant Schoolmaster or
teacher’.
• He uses Jacotot’s unusual method of teaching
(Universal Teaching Model) (Enseignement universel),
later renamed “the Panecastic System” as the basis for
his arguments.
• Panecastic was anchored in self-discovery, correction
and trial and error approach (anti-explication model).
(Citton, 2010, p. 26)

4. Key constructs for the universal
teaching model
• Stultification and abruitissement
• Explication
• Intelligence equality
• Equal intelligence
• Inequality of intelligence

5. Explicating the explication
• Rancire describes this ‘chance experiment’ in his book ‘the
ignorant schoolmaster’ (Ranciere, 1987 as cited in Citton,
2010)
• He decries “the Old Master” (the Old-Lady/la Vieille)
teaching methods of the Old Testament (Citton, 2010, p.
25) as being stultifying, unjust and dehumnaizing.
• The Old Lady methods assume that the master’s role is to
transmit knowledge to his dull students to bring them to
his own level of expertise.
• The essential act of the master is, falsely understood, as to
transmit and explicate (explain; clarify; expound;
elucidate) knowledge to ignorant learners.
• Jacotot had reasoned and acted as an Old Testament Teacher
for over 30 years.

6. Explicating the explication 2
• By chance, a grain of sand had gotten into the machine. He
had given no explanation to his “ students” on the first
elements of the language (Ranceire, 1987, p.3).
• Jacotot puts his Flemish students together to learn the
French language and create sentences by themselves
without any explications.
• He only provided the books and the translator (Tools).
• He concluded that explications were unnecessary as
students could learn own their own.
• He likened this children learning a first language and other
life lessons from birth.

7. Explicators exposed 1
• Ranciere makes a series of arguments to explain the reasoning
behind theory.
• E.g., ‘‘the singular art of the explicator: the art of distance’’
(Ranceire, 1987 as cited in Citton, 2010, p. 27).
• This means masters need to recognize the fragility of the
distance that exist between knowledge and the learners to
bridge that gap (ZPD in Psychology).
• Masters should also recognize the distance between learning
and understanding and seek to bridge it.
• The master holds privileged status of speech (Harbemas
Speech Terms); and must refrain from abusing this status to
avoid increasing the distance and detach learning processes
(Epistemological harming/testimonial Injustices).

8. Questions of hierarchy in explication
• The Old-Lady model assumes oral explication (talking) is
necessary for understanding the texts.
• This breeds unequal returns for various intellectual
endeavours.
• Ranciere argues ‘what children learn best is what no master
can explicate: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we
speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and
repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by
chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an
age for explicators to begin instructing them, they are
almost all-regardless of gender, social condition, and skin
colour-able to understand and speak the language of their
parents (Ranciere, 1987 as cited in Citton, 2010, pp. 4-5).

9. Explication exposed 2
xplication cannot cure the incapacity of the students to learn
nderstand.
re-enforces the structural fiction of this world as advanced
lato in the ‘Republic’ and Socrates; which argued:
“Those who know” (the so-called experts) have claimed the righ
e invested with political authority due to their superior knowled
he division of labour delineated by Socrates illustrated the esse
f justice in the macroscopic case of ‘the City’ which demanded t
ach individual remain in the place/function attributed to him by
ptimal distribution of specialized skills: thus bakers should

10. Implications of explication
• This assumed that those knowledgeable/powerful were
positioned to decide for the powerless masses, and the
powerless be governed by the powerful.
• This ideology has made explicators think they perform
a kind job for their students: that of equalizing them
through explication, to raise their listeners to a higher
level of understanding like themselves.

11. Explication exposed 3
• This misleading ideology has seen teachers confusing knowledge with
authority.
• Ironically, all explicators need the ignorant students the most not the
other way around for them to function; hence the explicators
constitute the ignorant.
• In other words, through explication, we indirectly tell students that
they cannot understand things by themselves, and this leads to
‘stultification and objectification (Citton, 2010 p. 28).
• Explication is the myth of pedagogy; the parable of two antagonist
worlds: that of the knowers and the brutes; the ripe and unripe; capable
and incapable; the intelligent and the dumb.
“The master, having thrown a veil of ignorance over everything that is to
be learned, he appoints himself the task of lifting it. Until he came along,
the child has been groping blindly, figuring out riddles. Now he will

12. Explication overturned 4
• The master ignorantly thinks he is transmitting his
knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual
capacities of the students.
• He thinks explication allows him to verify that
students have satisfactorily understood what he
learned and planned for his learners.
• Together, these form the key principles of
explication.
• The master ignorantly learns on behalf of his
students as he prepares his talk.

13. Enforced stultification
• Stultification means to dull/stupidify someone’s interest by
being monopolistic hence making students seem dull
(abrutissement).
• Insensitive, dull-witted masters cram their students’ minds
with poorly digested chunks of knowledge.
• Wicked teachers utter half-truths to re-enforce their power,
and the social order of the world while hiding their
incompetence (they fear dialogue and engagement).
• Because of their limited knowledge, they think they are more
knowledgeable, and better positioned to act as a good
Samaritans in donating nonsense to desperate students.
• The more they claim to know, the greater the distance they
create between the students and true knowledge.

14. Implications of stultification
• Children who are explained to will devote most of their
intelligence to the work of grieving to understanding.
• They will seek to understand why they do not understand until
someone explicates it to them.
• The so-called 'geniuses"attach the creature they have rendered
inferior with the strongest chains in the land of stultification -
the child's consciousness of his own superiority" (Ranciere,
1987 p.22).
• “This pedagogic myth...divides the world into two
hemispheres: that of the inferior intelligence and the superior
intelligence” (Rancière, 1987, p. 16).
• What the students learn from this, before anything else, is that
“thehy cannot understand (the object of knowledge) if it is not
explained to him” (Ranciere, 1987, p. 18). Such is the
“stultifying effect” of pedagogy (p. 17).

15. Undoing explication
• Good masters know that students no longer submit to the
Rod and Lords, but to unhierarchical world of intelligence.
• They thus become vigilant and patient to ensure that
children are not lost through clear instruction and
translations but not explications.
• They simply identify books and allow learners to take
charge of the entire learning process just like Jacotot did
with his Flemish students.
• Children will then acquire new intelligence (master’s
explications) using their own ‘‘Will Power’’ and procedures.
• They can then become own explicators since they own the
process.

16. The emancipatory master 1
• Knows that students can learn without a master as a
chatterbox.
• Leaves his intelligence out of the picture, and allows students’
to grapple with the objects of learning (i.e books).
• Knows that stultification subordinates pupils intelligence over
his own.
• ‘‘A person…may need a master when his own ‘‘Will’’ is
insufficient to set him on track, and keep him there. But that
subjection is purely one of ‘’will over will.’’It becomes
stultification when it links an intelligence to another
intelligence (Ranciere, 1987, p. 13).
• In other words, the master knows that emancipation occurs
when the act of intelligence obeys only itself even when the
‘will’ obeys another ‘will’.

17. The emancipatory master 2
• One can teach what one doesn’t know if the student
is allowed to use his own intelligence.
• To emancipate an ignorant person, one must first of
all emancipate oneself/ become conscious of the true
power of the human mind.
• The ignorant person will learn by himself what the
master doesn’t know if the master believes he can,
and obliges him to realize his full potential.

18. The emancipatory master 3
• He knows that emancipation needs recognition
of equality.
• He understands that what stultifies learners is
their own belief in their own inferiority of their
intelligence but not lack of explication.
• He knows that what stultifies the “inferiors” also
stultifies the “superiors” at the same time.
• He knows that truthful intelligence is one that
speaks to others who are capable of verifying
that truth through equality of their intelligence.

19. The emancipatory master 4
• That superior mind therefore condemns itself to
never being understood by the inferiors.
"Whoever looks also finds. He doesn't necessarily
find what he was looking for, and even less what he
was supposed to find. But he finds something new to
relate to the things that he already know. What is
essential is the continuous vigilance, the attention
that never subsides without irrationality setting in -
something that the learned one, like the ignorant
one, excels at." (Ranciere, 1987, p.33)

20. Implications for educational practice
(Lessons) 1
• Equal intelligence of human beings...the method of
“universal education” as advanced by Jacotot (Citton,
2010).
• SA Educational Act assumes that there are equal minds
(one-world), that of learners and teachers.
• That explication is not required for the students to learn
better:
“This does not mean that they have learned without a
master, they just learned without an explainer master”

21. Implications for educational practice
(Lessons) 2
• Emancipation exists when intelligence obeys itself; thus,
when people use their own intelligence (knowledge), without
the need to use the intelligence of the ‘other’.
• It exists when students make their own discoveries.
• Emancipation is possible since the intelligence of a being is
considered equal for everybody, but not polarising the
“hierarchy of individual intellectual capacity”
• Emancipation does not mean that all intelligences are equal,
rather use of a person’s intelligence based on the intelligence
equality. (see Citton, 2010, p. 31-32)
• Teachers mustn’t explain everything to everybody but rather
guide them through the learning processes.

22. Implications for educational practice
(Lessons) 3
• Teachers should encourage students to think and
reflect on phenomena, giving them conditions for
finding value, temporality and meaning to life.
• Each student has his/her own experience that makes
them unique in their intelligence.
• Each student can use their own autonomy, and
intelligence to build their own social/individual
relationship with the phenomena.
• Students must "say what they see; what they think
about it and what they make out of it." p.20

23. Implications for educational practice
(Lessons) 4
• The first principle of Universal Teaching is that "one
must learn something, and then relate everything else
to it."
• There is need for respect for individuality.
‘‘There is no link between teaching and having
knowledge. The inequalities that education aims to
solve can be stopped not through explication but by
establishing a relationship of equality between the
master and student…
• Teaching, in its aim of generating intellectual
equality, should consequently start from the principle
: “all humans have equal intelligences” (1987, p. 34)

24. Implications for educational practice
(Lessons) 5
• Teaching through explication is merely training in
the modes of academia, rather than an intellectual
adventure and/or criticality.
• Explication is at the core of the reproduction of
social inequalities and hegemonic tendencies.
• Discovery is key to emancipation from social class
society.
• Explication cannot redeem incapacity to
understand knowledge.

25. Implications for educational practice
(Lessons) 6
• Explication reproduces dependence and
exploitation, which constitute the generative
principle of the social world, and inequalities.
• Humans may reclaim their dignity; take measure
of their intellectual capacity, and decide how to
use it." (Ranciere, 1987, p.17)
***Also read, Citton, Y. (2010). The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Knowledge and Authority. Jacques
Rancière : Key Concepts, Acumen, pp.25-37, 2010. ffhal-00847083f. Accessed from
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00847083/document on 25/04/2021.

26. The End
Good luck as you carry the Anti-explicative
message further.
Thank you