Childhood, Education and Philosophy

New ideas for an old relationship

Walter Kohan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317658443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book explores the idea of a childlike education and offers critical tools to question traditional forms of education, and alternative ways to understand and practice the relationship between education and childhood. Engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben and Simón Rodríguez, it contributes to the development of a philosophical framework for the pedagogical idea at the core of the book, that of a childlike education.

Divided into two parts, the book introduces innovative ideas through philosophical argument and discussion, challenging existing understandings of what it means to teach or to form a child, and putting into question the idea of education as a process of formation. The first part of the book consists of a dialogue with a number of interlocutors in order to develop an original conception of education. The second part presents the idea of a childlike education, beginning with a discussion of the relationships between childhood and philosophy, and followed by a critique of the place of philosophical experience in a childhood of education.

Instead of asking how philosophy might educate childhood, this book raises the question of how childhood might educate philosophy. It will be of key value to researchers, educators and postgraduate students in the fields of education and the human sciences.

PART I Inspiration for a childlike education

1 Teaching as verification of equality Jacques Rancière and The Ignorant Schoolmaster

10.4324/9781315765778-1

The Brazilian reception

To begin with, I would like to position the reception of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster in the context of Brazil, where I’ve been working for the last few years. In this country, the field of philosophy of education is a very complex one. There is a very strong influence of Christian thinking when it comes to the theoretical approach found in teacher formation, many of them coming from religious seminars. A second important point of reference is the influence of Marxism and, more often than expected, a combination of these two tendencies, under the motto of what could be called a “critical-progressive” education. In effect, a sort of Christian-Marxism, faithful, and devoted, positions itself, theoretically, to overcome inequalities and social injustices through a critical work in the educational institutions: we teach to transform society, to build a critical conscience that will bring revolutionary changes to a society—such as the Brazilian one—that has been waiting for such changes for centuries.

On the fringes of this dominant tendency—with many aspects and versions, more or less Marxist, more or less Christian, simplified to the extreme here—there is a dissemination of small groups working with philosophy of education, in dialogue with different contemporary philosophical orientations: transcendental pragmatism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutic, phenomenology, neo-pragmatism, post-structuralism, critical theory, etc. A matter that concerns many philosophers of education of diverse trends is the teaching of philosophy in many different levels. In Brazil, philosophy is now a mandatory discipline in high school, one that is increasing and expanding¹.

These proclivities that we mentioned before began to inscribe themselves institutionally in the formation of the educators who in many cases come from seminaries, teaching programs or social sciences. If in the former cases the teaching of Philosophy of Education is strong but distinctly doctrinal, in the latter it is almost non-existent. In this sense, many educators do what they can: carry out an introduction to the main field and topics of classic philosophy, a manualized history of the philosophical ideas about education, an overview of the major schools of thought that exist in Brazilian education; in other words, they carry out a synthetic presentation and application of philosophical current ideas into the field of education.

Within this context, it is not hard to imagine the doubts and mistrust surrounding the acceptance of a thought such as J. Rancière’s, specifically toward his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, a text in which the philosophical intervention focuses on an educational situation. The Portuguese translation of Rancière’s book was published in Brazil in 2002. This edition has specially written preface (though unpublished) in which Rancière refers to The Ignorant Schoolmaster and its relevance to the Brazilian context. In that same year, Rancière presented the book in the First French-Brazilian Colloquium of Philosophy of Education at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. In 2003, the prestigious magazine Educação & Sociedade (Campinas, 24, 82, 2003) published a Dossier titled “Freedom and Equality in Education. With regards of The Ignorant Schoolmaster”, ² featuring an interview with J. Rancière by Patrice Vermeren, Laurence Cornu, and Andrea Benvenuto and texts from a dozen professors from different countries that establish a dialogue with Rancière’s book.

The context of the instituted policy marked the upswing of progressivism in Brazil at this time with Lula and the Workers’ Party’s victory in the 2002 presidential elections. Education was in the air, acting as the engine and driving force of the social transformations that the country had been asking for since its colonial times. Within this frame of exuberant optimism, The Ignorant Schoolmaster is an ungodly appearance that questions and threatens the foundations of such optimism. Therefore, this book has been received with some enthusiasm in Brazil; but above all, it is also a source of uneasiness for many people.

Part of the discomfort has to do with the style of the book. In an academia that focuses on apparently more solid discourses and serious treatises and manuals, one in which the explanation, so criticized by Jacotot, is the key of the pedagogical mechanism, such an unpretentious and systematic story is somewhat doomed to be underestimated as a fable, as pure fiction. The obsession with explaining pedagogical pretenses, trends and movements is at odds with a story that not only does not offer explicative outlines, but also leaves us without methods for teaching, learning or explaining (even though it does not do without its own explanations).

There are also philosophical issues, political and untimely controversies that go against the dominant way of thinking in the educational field. I will mention only a few of them_ Perception of Humanity, Tautology of Potentiality, the Relationship between Will and Intelligence, the Uniqueness of Intelligence, Equality as a Principle, the Relationship between Ignorance and Inequality, Criticism to Explanation and Transmission, the Absence of a Method…

Despite all that, the most controversial matters that arise from The Ignorant Schoolmaster are, above all, political. In the aforementioned interview, Rancière clarifies some ideas that look similar to the most influential thinker of Brazilian Modern Education: Paulo Freire. Rancière situates Freire along with Jacotot; they are faced with the positivist and pedagogical slogan of “Order and Progress” where both disrupt the assumed harmony between social order and intellectual order. However, Rancière also makes sure he lays out the difference between them_ nothing is more divergent from Jacotot than a method for social “consciousness”. In contrast with the most influential Latin American pedagogue of our time, Jacotot attests that equality is strictly an individual matter and that it is impossible for it to be institutionalized.

It is here where Rancière leaves room for one possible approach: although intellectual emancipation fails to flourish within the social context, there is not a social emancipation that does not presuppose an individual one. In this sense, as Rancière himself suggests in the interview, something links Jacotot’s anarchism to Paulo Freire’s optimism_ “In the process for intellectual emancipation as a vector of movements of political emancipation that breaks social logic, a logic of institution” (Educação & Sociedade, 2003: 199).

With all that, we argue that the distances between Jacotot-Rancière and Paulo Freire are fundamental and are exponents of the principles and ways of understanding politics. According to Rancière, politics, derived from an axiom of equality, is an exceptional phenomenon in history. In contrast, for Freire, education is just a political act of emancipation per excellence. If for Rancière the figure of the teacher and the emancipator are never to be confused with one another, thus following different logics (“Being an emancipator is always possible as long as the role of an intellectual emancipator it is not to be confused with the role of a teacher (…) it is necessary to distantiate the reasons (…) an emancipator is not a teacher (…) It is possible to be a teacher, a citizen, and emancipator; but it is not possible to be all three under only one logic”, Educação & Sociedade, 2003: 201), for Freire, on the contrary, those roles are not dissociable: a teacher who does not emancipate is a teacher who does not deserve to be called a teacher; being a teacher only makes sense (politically) when the pedagogical relationship is turned into a drive for emancipation, understood as an act of love, dialogue, and the consciousness-raising of the oppressed. In this sense, in a context where the optimism of Freire is profoundly influential, a death blow to any easy optimism will generate quick defenses and antibodies.

At last, there is another aspect in the political criticism of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, perhaps a more interesting as well as defiant one. It is said that the book could carry out an appropriate critical function in a European country such as France, with a modern and consolidated State, with a public school system that even with its problems still has the appropriate level of a developed country when it comes to the index of universality, illiteracy, school dropout and grade retention—incomparably superior to the ratings of Brazil. In contrast, in a country that has not been able to include all its population into the school institution, with an educational public system weakened and destabilized by the latest privatizing and elitist educational reforms, with schools on the verge of collapse, it is argued from the dominant pedagogical establishment that a decentralizing criticism such as the one of The Ignorant Schoolmaster could only have a conservative and regressive effect: it weakens what is public, precisely what needs to be strengthened in the face of the present pretension of the hegemony of the market and the private sector.

Even though the country has made significant progress during the last decade in terms of school inclusion, the context of established politics in Brazil after a period of more than ten years of the Workers’ Party government generates less and less political optimism; the general lines in relation to the reception of The Ignorant Schoolmaster have not changed. With this essay, we are not proposing a defense of this book. On the one hand, we have done that in the presence of its critics³; on the other hand, it seems more interesting to think from these lines of inquiry about some problems situated between philosophy, politics, and education.

A politic of disagreement?

We believe that part of the nuisance that The Ignorant Schoolmaster provokes in this context allows space for the visibility of one of its main virtues: a revitalizing way of understanding and reaffirming philosophy in the educational field. As in the Presentation of this book, it is worth recalling the distinction that M. Foucault made between two different types of books, or better yet, between two types of relationships that we establish with writing: a relation of truth or a relation based on experience. In the case of the former, a book functions as something that is written to pass along what we know or that it is read to learn what is unknown; to communicate thoughts or to learn what others are thinking about. The latter, in turn, is a book that functions as a device that allows us to question the truths in which the author or the reader is embedded. If in the first instance the relation legitimates a truth, then the second one problematizes that truth and the relationship with it. If a relationship of truth leaves the author and his thoughts intact, the writing and reading as experience transform oneself and others.

A book so beautifully written such as The Ignorant Schoolmaster invites us to enter a relation based on experience, to settle in a destabilizing and critical way of thinking. Conversely, if we read The Ignorant Schoolmaster as a book of truths, we would not profit from it; moreover, it would actually be put to death, which is something that the book seems to fight from beginning to end. On the contrary, as a reading experience, Jacotot and Rancière can help us to think differently about the matters in question. In the case of the readers/teachers, the experience of the teacher Jacotot can help us to be teachers in a different way.

In order to get the most out of Jacotot, we have to sit with him shoulder to shoulder, as equals—this expression has never been more on point; we must allow him to make us feel uncomfortable, to provoke us, to make us fret. In this sense, there is an undeniable philosophical and political value of a way of thinking that does not leave things the same way it found them_ quite the opposite, it will trap the reader in a circle from which he or she will have to make their own way out, and with a quite different perspective to the one he or she entered with.

It is here where the interesting and problematic part starts, because it is noticeable that a reading experience that puts out and makes people fret will demand new places and new relationships. And in this sense, The Ignorant Schoolmaster remains silent. It does not prescribe or authorize. There is an emptiness, and absence; there are neither methods nor paths. Up to here, there is no problem. Quite the opposite, pedagogy is so filled with easy, simplifying and superficial answers, that a little bit of silence will help it breathe! One can see there the proper gesture of philosophy, one with a unique elegance. There is nothing more interesting for a teaching or learning situation than the emptiness which creates space to think about the “how”, “where”, “when”, or “what” of education. The point of the matter is that in The Ignorant Schoolmaster there is not only absence of prescription but also that the last word appears to be the impossibility, a normalized negation: “No political party, government, army, school nor institution will ever emancipate a single person” (Rancière, 2004: 132).

In other words, The Ignorant Schoolmaster plays with the value and the context of an educational practice between equality and emancipation. The relationship is circular: it departs from one concept to arrive at the other one. At the same time, it verifies the former one. The problem is that both of them can never encounter each other in a formal social context: “Universal teaching is not and cannot be a social method; it cannot be extended on or by the social institutions” (ibid.: 135); the alternative is exclusive: “it is necessary to choose between creating an unequal society with equal men, or an equal society with unequal men” (ibid.: 171). Emancipation does not go beyond a relationship between individuals: there is not and there cannot be in The Ignorant Schoolmaster an emancipating and educational project.

Thus, the philosophical gesture prompts a political and chimerical disagreement (there is only politics in dreams: “to dream an emancipated society that would be a society of artists”, ibid.: 95); it also prompts a distance, an excision, and an impossibility (“a man can be reasonable, not a citizen”, ibid.: 112), there is no margin (“a citizen knows the reason of the civic madness. But, at the same time, he knows it as insurmountable”, ibid.: 117).

According to Rancière-Jacotot, this absence of political possibilities, at least in the states where there is social normalcy in institutions and schools, should take them into conformity: “it would be sufficient to learn to be men of equal status in an unequal society. This is what emancipation means” (ibid.: 171); “Without a doubt, emancipated people are respectful towards social order. They know that social order is, at any rate, better than disorder” (ibid: 136). It is true that the emancipated ones do not give in to social order (“But it is all he can be given, and no institution could be satisfied at this minimum”, ibid.) but they neither threaten social order (“He knows what he can expect of a social order and he would not provoke big disruptions”, ibid.: 141).

We are interested in discussing those implications that have a certain air of pessimism or fatalism within The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Ultimately, it is about questioning opinions with other opinions. Opinions of resistance against other opinions of resistance.

Let it be clear: we are not interested in affirming simple optimism. Perhaps it could be interesting to think about different ways of optimism. There are simple optimisms: to believe that everything is wonderful, possible or that things will turn for the better, more or less at a fast pace. We do not share this type of optimism, but only the one that attests for the idea that things can always be different, a Foucauldian type of optimism (“My optimism consists rather in saying: there are so many things that can be changed, as fragile as they are, more related to contingencies than to needs, more to arbitrariness rather than to evidence, more complex and temporary historical contingencies as opposed to inevitable anthropological constant” (Foucault, 1994/1981: 182)). History is not closed; the last word has never been said. Ultimately, it is also about a Jacototist motive: “The ‘I cannot’ it is not a name of any fact” (Rancière, 2004: 76); “It is about confirming the power of reason, to observe what it can be done with it, or what reason can do to maintain itself active at the center of extreme madness” (ibid.: 124). To be optimistic does not necessarily mean to be a naive progressist.

We live at the center of extreme civic madness; perhaps more clearly in Latin America where inequality reigns. It is true that in some of our countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, maybe they are the best examples—there are interesting political experiences now being carried out. But in the general scheme of things there is little space for politics, there is no serious democracy, there is only capital and market; in other words, barbarism and exclusion. There are not enough reasons fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• New directions in the philosophy of education series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ foreword
• Presentation
• Preface: School and the future of schole: A preliminary dialogue with David Kennedy
• PART I Inspiration for a childlike education
• PART II Philosophy and a childlike education
• Afterword: The pedagogue and/or the philosopher? An exercise in thinking together: a dialogue with Jan Masschelein
• Index