From The Ignorant Master to The Initiator: school form and intellectual emancipation

Abstract

By narrating the intellectual adventure of Jacotot, Rancière brushes the story against the grains - resorting to the Benjaminian metaphor -, echoing a voice that seemed condemned to oblivion. This text aims at exposing the ways in which Jacotot opposes a stultifying master to an emancipating one, who verifies in the present the equal capacity of everyone to understand the works of human intelligence. In face of this dichotomy, I propose an intermediate image: the master as an initiator, for whom an educational process committed to the equality principle cries out for both the intellectual emancipation and the intergenerational transmission of a legacy of symbolic experiences that provides durability to a world of historical achievements.