A Mental Adventure

“This is the first principle of universal education: to learn something and associate everything with it. Therefore, it is necessary to learn something first.”

I’ve just finished a very inspiring book from Jacques Ranciere: The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Joseph Jacotot, who was a French teacher in Leuven in 1818, was sentenced to exile to the Netherlands due to some political issues. Since he was strongly passionate about his occupation, he was excited about the new chapter of his life. But there was a huge problem. The students didn’t know a single word in French. In the same way, Jacotot didn’t have any idea about Dutch. As chance would have it, Fenelon published his book Telemachus bilingually at that time. So, now there was a common point. He distributed the book to his students and wanted them to understand French texts using the translation then, when they read half of the book, to repeat everything that they learned until that time. In the end, students had to write a basic report about the book. This was the kind of experiment that the Age of Enlightenment loved.

When he wanted to read the students’ thoughts about the book, he was expecting to see horrible sentences. But this was not important for him, he just wanted to see the results of this road that happened coincidentally. Outcomes were surprising. The students wrote their homework as well as a Frenchman, although Jacotot hadn’t explained the basics of French or even any conjugations. They learned everything by themselves. They observed, learned, repeated, tried to make a connection between the things that they knew and they were trying to know. They took the road by guessing. Then this question was inevitable: Was it not necessary to reverse the accepted order of mental values?

This experience suggested to Jacotot that all students were of equal intelligence because they all had the same capacity for reason. Therefore, the aim of education was not to explicate an established body of knowledge but rather to have students realize their own capacity for reason and intelligence by recognizing the necessity of its use. His students were waiting for him in the evenings with the lights of candles in a tiny salon to hear that sentence: “I have to teach you that I have nothing to teach you.”