This extraordinary book can be read on several levels. Primarily, it is
the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiles French schoolteacher who
discovered in 1818 an unconventional teaching method that spread panic
throughout the learned community of Europe.
Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to
Flemish students who knew no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was
not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn. The results
of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all
people were equally intelligent. From this postulate, Jacotot devised a
philosophy and a method for what he called "intellectual
emancipation"--a method that would allow, for instance, illiterate
parents to themselves teach their children how to read. The greater part
of the book is devoted to a description and analysis of Jacotot's
method, its premises, and (perhaps most important) its implications for
understanding both the learning process and the emancipation that
results when that most subtle of hierarchies, intelligence, is
overturned.
The book, as Kristin Ross argues in her introduction, has profound
implications for the ongoing debate about education and class in France
that has raged since the student riots of 1968, and it affords Rancière
an opportunity (albeit indirectly) to attack the influential educational
and sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (and others) that Rancière
sees as perpetuating inequality.
