Essay - Ignorant Schoolmaster

Gabriel Faerstein

The ignorant schoolmaster tells the story of Jacotot, an experienced

French linguistic teacher, and his journey to understand education and
change its status quo.
The book develops into a criticism of the educational system, when
Jacotot has an interesting challenge: Teaching French to Flemish
students, with no knowledge of their language. How would that be
possible, if teachers are supposed to explain?
Jacotot did an experiment. He gave his students a bilingual version of a
book, in French and Flemish. With that, his students were supposed to
read both versions, recite them and try to understand what the French
version said. Surprisingly, in some time his students were able to
understand the French grammar, all by themselves. Even better, they
did it faster than usual!
This inspired Jacotot to reflect about the education model based on
Explication. How did they learn if no one was explaining anything? Was
explication good for his students?
Thinking about it, Jacotot reached the conclusion that explication is not
only superfluous within education, but a bad thing: It deprives the
students of living their own learning journeys, and puts them in an
inferior position. If we are all able to learn our mother tongues simply
by experimenting, listening to our parents and trying to imitate, we can
do it with basically everything. Besides not letting the learning journey
develop into a rich experience, the explication also creates a hierarchy
where the teacher becomes superior, looking down with the students
with less knowledge and intelligence. The students then look up to
someone who is supposedly smarter, and lose their creativity and will
to learn on their own.
The book also talks and differentiates between two characteristics from
men: Intelligence and Will. What Jacotot thinks is that true
emancipation (breaking the hierarchy and giving students freedom to
have their own learning journeys) happens when the student respects
and follows his own intelligence, and not the teachers. Maybe the
teachers will can still be followed (schedules and subjects to learn
about), but the students way of learning (intelligence) must be

followed. This way, each student uses their own methods of learning,
reaching the same final results with different journeys.
The way of assessment of the students progress also needs to change,
according to Jacotot. In the traditional way, students are assessed
based on what they learned and the way they learned it, which needs
to be based on what the teacher asked. This way ensures that only the
teachers intelligence and will are respected. The way proposed to
change that is to actually assess that the students worked, not how
they worked.
This all is also the basis for universal teaching. By making sure the
students follow their own journey and dedicate themselves to learn,
anyone can teach about anything, even subjects they are not familiar
with.
Jacotot believes that everyone has the same level of intelligence. The
quality of work produced varies, but that is only because of the level of
attention and dedication people put in their tasks. That means that if
someone produces less qualified work they are not less intelligent,
they just didnt give the task enough attention.
The most interesting part comes when his theory surpasses education,
but enters society itself. The whole premise of emancipation and
equality between intelligences is not accepted by society, and its
extremely clear why. The whole educational system and hierarchy are
just mirroring and developing the society that helps the rich and
deprives the poor. If people feel inferior, they only give more power to
the people that pretend to be superior. Thats the whole point of why
Jacotots way of thinking wont be easily translated into society: too
many powerful people dont want it to happen.
Reading ignorant schoolmaster was a difficult experience. Most of the
concepts used on the book are extremely intangible at times, and
philosophical paradigms are extremely complex. Having said that, the
idea of emancipating students and letting them build and experience
their own learning journey is something that attracts me. In my
experience, experimentation and trial and error are extremely more
efficient than explicatory learning. Once you live and experience, fail or
succeed, you can learn from what happened. That sort of knowledge,
based on experience, is the one that sticks with you for life.
Of course the book and its theory have their flaws. It is extremely
difficult to develop and educational model without any sort of
curriculum or structure. It is all based on the will to learn, and that
might come to a point where people dont want to learn anything

specific. Then, the learning process would stop completely. It is

extremely interesting, but maybe a little bit of care should be applied.
Inspiration and motivation are necessary nowadays to get things
started with students. In our time we were spoiled and cut off with
years of explications and structure, it is, then, hard to make a change.
The only way to truly emancipate people is connecting with something
that moves them forward.
What I find extremely interesting is the concept of building your own
learning path. Students need to take charge of their journeys, build
them and learn what they want in the way that better fits their needs.
We can bring that to the Team Academy scenery in several ways. We
already have a program that gives freedom to the teampreneurs to
pursue their own passions and learning paths, but the first step is
always the mentality. We need to take charge of everything we do, and
understand that it is our own responsibility to develop ourselves.