The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation 

 By Jacques Rancière  (Stanford University Press, 1991)

While reading The Ignorant Schoolmaster, I kept thinking: This is either the most brilliant or the most ridiculous book on education I’ve read.

Rancière builds his argument on the experiences of Joseph Jacotot, a 19th-century French teacher who taught Dutch students French without knowing any Dutch himself. Jacotot discovered he could successfully teach French without being able to explain in Dutch anything about French grammar or literature. From Jacotot’s experience, Rancière draws a radical conclusion: One can teach what they do not know. The teacher’s job, he argues, is not to deliver knowledge but to inspire students to use their own intelligence. With the right tools and motivation, students can teach themselves.

Rancière further contends that even a teacher without deep expertise can effectively evaluate a student’s performance. Mastery often reveals itself in ways that go beyond factual knowledge and can be recognized by anyone willing to observe. What matters most is a student’s engagement with what they have learned and their ability to apply it to their own context. These abilities are often more universally recognizable than the accumulation of facts.

As for my own dilemma — whether this is a brilliant or foolish book — Rancière would say I don’t need to be an expert to answer. In fact, perhaps I’m too much of an expert to judge, as the book destabilizes what we think we know about teaching and learning.

This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 3, p. 7.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Paul Gee

James Paul Gee is Regents’ Professor, Emeritus, at Arizona State University, Tempe. He is the author of What is a Human? Language, Mind, and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Tech, High-Risk World: A Framework for Becoming Human (Teachers College Press, 2017).