In prison this morning, conversation about our experiences in school and concerns about where things are in education.
Later, writing a reference for a former student with whom I studied in Maine State Prison, I'm reminded of Jacques Rancière (b.1940) and Joseph Jacotot (4March 1770 - 30July 1840) in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation:
“Whoever looks always 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 thing he already knows. What is essential is the continuous vigilance, the attention that never subsides without irrationality setting in…”
“There aren’t two sorts of mind. There is inequality in the manifestations of intelligence, according to the greater or lesser energy communicated to the intelligence by the will for discovering and combining new relations; but there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacity. Emancipation is becoming conscious of this equality of nature. This is what opens the way to all adventure in the land of knowledge. It is a matter of daring to be adventurous, and not whether one learns more or less well or more or less quickly.”
“The only mistake would be to take our opinions for the truth.”
“Reason begins when discourses organized with the goal of being right cease, beings where equality is recognized: not an equality decreed by law or force, not a passively received equality, but an equality in act, verified, at each step by those marchers who, in their constant attention to themselves a[n]d in their endless revolving around the truth, find the right sentences to make themselves understood by others.”
“Equality was not an end to attain, but a point of departure, a supposition to maintain in every circumstance. ”
https://divnapopov.com/2020/06/03/jacques-ranciere-the-ignorant-schoolmaster-five-lessons-in-intellectual-emancipation/
It was always a bone of contention, this premise that 'All men [humans] have equal intelligence.' Also, that the key to education is finding out, not being told the way things are. Not explication, but investigation.
The revelation that came to Joseph Jacotot amounts to this: the logic of the explicative system had to be overturned. Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand.
On the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way
around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before being the act of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid. The explicator’s special trick consists of this double inaugural gesture. On the one hand, he decrees the absolute beginning: it is only now that the act of learning will begin. On the other, having thrown a veil of ignorance over everything that is to be learned, he appoints himself to the task of lifting it. Until he came along, the child has been groping blindly, figuring out riddles. Now he will learn. He heard words and repeated them. But now it is time to read, and he will not understand words if he doesn’t understand syllables, and he won’t understand syllables if he doesn’t understand letters that neither the book nor his parents can make him understand—only the master’s word. The pedagogical myth, we said, divides the world into two. More precisely, it divides intelligence into two. It says that there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one. The former registers perceptions by chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need. This is the intelligence of the young child and the common man. The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this intelligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the student has satisfactorily understood what he learned. Such is the principle of explication. From this point on, for Jacotot, such will be the principle of enforced stultification.*
*In the absence of a precise English equivalent for the French term abrutir (to render stupid,
to treat like a brute), I’ve translated it as “stultify." Stultify carries the connotations of numbing
and deadening better than the word "stupefy,” which implies a sense of wonderment or amazement absent in the French.— TRANS. [Kristin Ross]
Some suggest today that it is a stultifying experience taking place, the absence of any productive intelligence at work in the stultifying behavior of so-called leaders. Just casual whim throwing causal chaos over everything.
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
(--Martin Heidegger)
Sobering, if not stultifying.
