The way in which a schoolmaster-supposed-to-be-wise can be authoritarian is fairly clear: the master posits a knowledge to which they alone have access, and they control the student by regulating their access to this supposed knowledge. But a pedagogy based on knowledge can also be egalitarian, if the knowledge of the master marks a purely contingent difference: the teacher happens to know something which in principle anyone can know, and the process of teaching consists in offering this knowledge to the student, for the student to do what they wish with. In the case of the ignorant schoolmaster, such equality is not possible. If the schoolmaster and the student are equally ignorant, what differentiates them? Either a purely arbitrary authority, or an authority grounded not in knowledge but in technique; the ignorant schoolmaster does not know what is being taught, but nonetheless knows how to teach it. This supposedly subject-neutral technique is the domain of Department of Education civil servants planning the National Curriculum, or university administrators deciding which departments to ax. Our contemporary Jacotot is Michael Gove.

That a supposed egalitarianism ends up underwriting a marked authoritarianism is consistent with a more general failing of Rancière’s work, which is that his radicalism seems to be limited to that of early 19th century republicanism. The axiom of equality is, after all, an axiom of liberalism, and Rancière’s equality is, like liberalism’s, formal and ultimately obfuscatory. This is illuminated by the connection Nina draws between Rancière’s positing of educational equality and Virno’s discussion of the “general intellect” in post-Fordist, communicative, capitalism. This is an extremely interesting connection but not one which is, I think, ultimately to Rancière’s credit. The fundamental difference between Rancière and Virno is that Rancière’s equality is a posited universal indifferent to any actual realization, while the general intellect is a real abstraction, something that develops through a specific set of material circumstances.

Politically, this means that Rancière focuses on discursive strategies that supposedly obscure this fundamental equality, ignoring the problem of real inequalities, and the material and institutional arrangements that reproduce them, and which might be reconfigured to produce a real equality. When Rancière attempts to show the denial of equality that produces the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he admits that “it had doubtless ceased  to be said that the members of the modern proletariat, the equivalent of the plebians of antiquity, are not speaking beings. It is simply assumed that there is no connection between the fact that they speak and the fact that they work” (Disagreement, 51). I’m not sure that this was ever true, but it’s surely not true in today’s capitalism, where communication is a crucial instrument of proletarianization.

More generally, Rancière’s focus on an equality that is prior to any actual arrangements of inequality means that he abandons class politics in favor of the kind of liberal universalism criticized by Marx in “On the Jewish Question.” Yes, Rancière claims that equality introduces the political division between the community and the part-with-no-part which has nothing in common with the community but this bare equality. But this assertion of equality works as an assertion of equality of the excluded with the rulers; the plebians “execute a series of speech acts that mimic those of the patricians” (Disagreement, 24). This is an assertion of equality purely on the patricians terms, not one which challenges the structures that produce patricians and plebeians. It is the same politics of dressing-up that Marx identifies in the republicans of 1848, who could only act by mimicking a reflection of a reflection of ancient Rome. What’s missing from Rancière is an understanding of a social revolution which would involve a genuine reconfiguration, rather than a shuffling of appearances: a political movement where “the content goes beyond the phrase.”

(I seem to remember Nina once describing Rancière as a “grumpy anarchist.” I suppose one could see this post as a grumpy—probably too grumpy—Marxist response.)

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On with the meme. I’m asked to “post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what you are most passionate for students to learn about.” I’ve chosen one of my favorite pictures, although one I know almost nothing about, a picture of a library after an air raid, from London in 1940. I’m not very good at teaching transferrable skills, or engaging students, or caring about them as individuals; in other words, the sorts of things I’m supposed to do in the neoliberal university, with its odd unity of trade school and finishing school (I suppose it’s not so odd; these are both ways of making yourself marketable). What I do care about is what the students think about politics and philosophy; or  that they think about these things, in other words, that they entertain the possibility that a certain kind of reflective or critical thought about their opinions might have some value of its own. Or, to return to the picture, I want to get across the idea that it might not be completely insane to respond to a bomb by walking to the library.

The meme also requires me to ask some other “educators” to participate. I hate the word “educator,” partly because it’s a four syllable synonym for the two syllable word “teacher,” and partly because of its slightly creepy teleology; you can’t be an educator, after all, unless you have the power to render people educated. But some other people whose thoughts on education I’m always interested in are Nate and Jasper (who also recently wrote a great post on the material preconditions of Berkeley introductory writing courses, that I so cheerfully glossed over above). Anyone else who reads this and wants to engage in some picture-thinking should consider themselves invited, too.

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At GCSE, the sheer volume of poetry, with the focus on technical analysis, coupled with “overly didactic teaching methods”, is putting pupils off.

I wish I’d been taught technical analysis of poetry when I was doing GCSEs; indeed, a bit of excess didacticism would have made a nice change from the strange “not actually teaching” method adopted by my teachers. Until a chance encounter with F. R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry, I had no interest in poetry at all, which seemed like a pointlessly deformed form of expression, arbitrarily constraining writing in favor of a childishly contingent similarity of sounds or rhythm. Leavis’s explanation that these constraints could mean something made an enormous impact on me, and I remember wondering why none of my teachers had thought to mention it.

It’s probably unfair to name this post after Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, particularly as I’ve never read it. But there is a certain style of teaching (it may well not be the one advocated by Rancière) based around a kind of faux-ignorance which is deeply reactionary. The pose of ignorance adopted by my English teachers devalues the education it’s supposed to be providing: if I am expected to be able to figure this stuff out on my own, why do I have to sit in school to do it? Teachers are not ignorant; they are teachers precisely because they know things their students do not know, and if this knowledge is worth anything they have an obligation to share it, not to pretend it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, to recognize this asymmetry of knowledge is a precondition of recognizing a more fundamental equality: that the student can understand, assimilate and accept or reject the same knowledge the teacher has already acquired.

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It’s also, particularly if you know your paper is going to be marked by a graduate student, quite possibly late at night when they’re not in such a great mood, probably unwise to claim that the extra-curricular activity you’ve chosen to write about requires “more work than a graduate student’s whole thesis.”

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