Education

This chapter examines the theory of intellectual emancipation that Rancière derives from his readings of the work of the nineteenth-century thinker Joseph Jacotot in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The chapter starts by situating The Ignorant Schoolmaster in the context of contemporary French debates about state education. It examines Rancière’s claims that the two opposing sides in these debates actually shared the same premises rooted in the interrelationships between sociology and French republican ideology. This involves an analysis of the relationship between the sociologies of education of Durkheim and Bourdieu, alongside an explanation of the influence of the first on the defenders of traditional educational values, the ‘republicans’, and of the second on the advocates of more progressive methods, the so-called ‘pedagogues’. The chapter then examines Rancière’s critique of the evolution of the republicans’ position into a rejection of democracy itself, itself assimilated to the anarchic rule of a mass of selfish individuals under mass consumerism. As Rancière shows, this ‘hatred of democracy’ underpins new forms of technocratic governance that pose as a necessary bulwark against the threat of ‘populism’.