The Emancipated Spectator

The master cannot ignore that the so-called ignorant pupil who sits in front of him in fact knows a lot of things, which he has learned on his own, by looking at and listening to the world around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, by repeating what he has heard and learned by chance, by comparing what he discovers with what he already knows, and so on. The master cannot ignore that the ignorant pupil has undertaken by these same means the apprenticeship that is the precondition of all others: the apprenticeship of his mother tongue. But for the master this is only the knowledge of the ignorant, the knowledge of the little child who sees and hears at random, compares and guesses by chance, and repeats by routine, without understanding the reason for the effects he observes and reproduces. The role of the master is thus to break with that process of hit-and-miss groping. It is to teach the pupil the knowledge of the knowledgeable, in its own way--the way of the progressive method, which dismisses all groping and all chance by explaining items in order, from the simplest to the most complex, according to what the pupil is capable of understanding, with respect to his age or social background and social expectations.

The primary knowledge that the master owns is the "knowledge of ignorance." It is the presupposition of a radical break between two forms of intelligence. This is also the primary knowledge that he transmits to the student: the knowledge that he must have things explained to him in order to understand, the knowledge that he cannot understand on his own. It is the knowledge of his incapacity. In this way, progressive instruction is the endless verification of its starting point: inequality. That endless verification of inequality is what Jacotot calls the process of stultification. The opposite of stultification is emancipation. Emancipation is the process of verification of the equality of intelligence. The equality of intelligence is not the equality of all manifestations of intelligence. It is the equality of intelligence in all its manifestations. It means that there is no gap between two forms of intelligence. The human animal learns everything as he has learned his mother tongue, as he has learned to venture through the forest of things and signs that surrounds him, in order to take his place among his fellow humans--by observing, comparing one thing with another thing, one sign with one fact, one sign with another sign, and repeating the experiences he has first encountered by chance. If the "ignorant" person who doesn't know how to read knows only one thing by heart, be it a simple prayer, he can compare that knowledge with something of which he remains ignorant: the words of the same prayer written on paper. He can learn, sign after sign, the resemblance of that of which he is ignorant to that which he knows. He can do it if, at each step, he observes what is in front of him, tells what he has seen, and verifies what he has told. From the ignorant person to the scientist who builds hypotheses, it is always the same intelligence that is at work: an intelligence that makes figures and comparisons to communicate its intellectual adventures and to understand what another intelligence is trying to communicate to it in turn.