ignorantJacques Rancière's intriguing book was published in the finishing eighties, but it's still topical.
"We think: Teaching can't be done without instructors, those who explain, who adapt their knowledge to the intellectual capacities of the pupil.
We think: There can be no progress without the mediation of such instructors.
We think: That we're helpless without instructors.
We think: That instruction is the most efficient way to make people know.
We are surrounded by instructors: in school, church and on the street, at the dinner table, on stage or on TV.
So far, no good.
The child learns to speak by relying on her own intelligence in the company of 'unconscious' teachers (her parents and others around her), none of whom explain the rudiments of language to her. But as soon as she does master language, we insist that she cannot continue like this any longer. From that moment on we surround her with instructors and explicators.
But, to explain something to someone is, first of all, to show her she cannot understand it by herself. How come? The child learnt her mother tongue perfectly; and not only this, she taught herself how to handle things and found out how things work and don't work. All this was done by observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, by relating what she was trying to know to what she already knew, by doing and reflecting about what she had done.
The pupil doesn't really need the explicator; it is the other way round. It is the explicator, the instructor, who needs the pupil. It is he who categorises the pupil as the 'incapable'.
This pedagogical myth divides the world into two. More precisely, it divides intelligence into two. It says 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. 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 she learned.
But understanding is never more than translating, delivering the equivalences of a text in terms of import or significance alone, without necessarily offering an insight into the working of its reasons. There is nothing behind a text, no false bottom that necessitates the work of an other intelligence, that of an explicator.
Whoever teaches without emancipating, stultifies. Emancipation is not an extraordinary thing. It consists simply in an ordinary person taking the measure of his/her intellectual capacity and deciding how to use it, in accordance with his/her own dignity. Whoever emancipates doesn't have to worry about what will be learnt by the person whose emancipation he desires: she will learn what she wants to. Maybe she will learn nothing."
Jan Ritsema, The Act of Instruction
I couldn't resume more precisely the beginning of Rancière's book than the dutch theater director and choreographer Jan Ritsema and I recommend the reading of the whole article.

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