On Being Equal: A Conversation about "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Wrong Place, Wrong Time: The Ignorant Schoolmaster Comes to America
Philosophy of Education, 2018
This paper pursues a critical perspective on Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster. To do so, I return to Rancière’s original base—the ideas of radically egalitarian educator Joseph Jacotot—in order to build an argument that these ideas are poorly suited for the North American educational context. I begin by laying out Jacotot’s program of universal teaching and explore two of the most important principles underlying it—the equality of intelligence and the power of the will. Following that, I link these principles to problematic ideas in American education, particularly the “grit” paradigm of educational success. I argue that not only is Jacotot’s program poorly laid out and unworkable both in principle and in practice, but it also intersects with some particularly dangerous trends, educational and otherwise.
A Passion for the Impossible: Jacques Ranciere Equality Pedagogy and the Messianic
This essay first locates Jacques Rancière's account of politics in the context of French thinking in the second half of the 20th century. It then summarizes how Rancière defines politics in terms of an originary equality that supports all orders of command and obedience. For Rancière, also, the world as a 'whole' does not add up. It is characterized by 'paradoxical magnitude'. Paradoxical magnitude means that every regime of politics will nonetheless also be a miscount, a 'wrong' that will in particular fail to satisfy the originary equality that is supposed by all 'partitions of the sensible'. Since there is no metric by reference to which the 'whole' of the world can be made to add up, politics cannot be an epistemological question. For Rancière it is a matter of the polemical practices by which equality is verified through emancipation. The complex 'taking place' of emancipation is the theme of teaching what we do not know that preoccupies Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Here, the essay argues, emancipation also finds a distinctly messianic expression. The aporetic difficulty of teaching what we do not know as an emancipatory practice is explored by reading The Ignorant Schoolmaster with and against Stanley Rosen's reading of Plato's Statesman, which poses the same problem but resolves it differently. The essay concludes by asking what is at stake in this messianic expression of emancipation.
Jacques Rancière and the contemporary scene, 2012
Review by Adam Burgos in PhaenEx 8, no.1 2013: "The first distinguishing feature of Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene is the inclusion of a discussion of education, a crucial element of Rancière‟s thinking that is often either ignored altogether or only attended to in a cursory way. Though only the focus of one essay, Caroline Pelletier‟s “No Time or Place for Universal Teaching: The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Contemporary Work on Pedagogy,” its placement between the first section of essays on aesthetics and the subsequent section on politics is instructive. Deranty and Ross make brief note of this in their introduction, drawing a parallel between, on the one hand, the fact that Pelletier‟s essay comes at the midpoint of the volume, and on the other, their claim that the progression of Rancière‟s work hinges on the notion of “universal teaching” (see 8). This is an important insight because it hints at the overall cohesion of Rancière‟s corpus in a way that doesn‟t get recognized enough. There is no essay on education in either of the two aforementioned collections on Rancière‟s work. Furthermore, of two recent monographs on Rancière‟s work there is only a discussion of education in one: Oliver Davis (2010) devotes ten pages in his introduction to the topic, while Joseph J. Tanke (2011) is altogether silent. The one exception to this trend is Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation, by Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta (2010). My point is not in any way to condemn these other works. Rancière‟s writings have, since the mid 1990s, been dominated by the twin themes of politics and aesthetics, so it is no surprise that these two themes are responsible for the vast majority of the secondary literature. What I do want to insist upon, however, is the essential relevance of the education question to an understanding of how Rancière‟s writings fit together as a coherent whole. This is a point that Pelletier‟s piece implies through the paths of discussion that it opens to some of Rancière‟s other works. I will make some of these links explicit later when I turn to a fuller discussion of Pelletier‟s essay." http://hrgpapers.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/article/viewFile/3923/3048
Contradictions and Curiosities in the Conception of "Equality" in Education
The Korean Journal of Educational Ideas, 2024
Equality is one of the most widely discussed ideals in modern education discourse. For all this prominence, however, the concept in practice suffers from several logical and practical problems. In particular, this paper examines the incompatibility of equal opportunity and meritocracy concepts with equal outcome concepts, why “equity” does not solve the issue, and how equality is often treated, dangerously, as a synonym of “ambition.” These problems, it is found, can trap both students and educators in situations with impossible expectations and severe mental stress. Historical theories of equality, including those of B.R. Ambedkar, Adolf Hitler, bell hooks, Hannah Arendt, Jacque Ranciere, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will be examined, used for context, and consulted in creating more rational alternatives to current equality discourses. The paper concludes that educators ought to minimize ambitious equality, which is harmful and irrational. Instead, educators ought to emphasize either equality of outcome or meritocracy, but not both.