In Praise of Ignorance: What if Learning is Not About Knowledge?

Socrates famously said: “I know one thing: that I know nothing.” In knowing that you know nothing he saw the only true wisdom – the telos (the final cause) of philosophy. But ignorance could also be a good starting point for learning, meaning not so much the ignorance of students but also and even primarily the ignorance of the teachers. Is it possible to learn from an ignorant schoolmaster? Yes, indeed, but only if we don’t mistake the process of learning for an acquisition of knowledge, its extraction, accumulation, structuring, and transfer from some source. The telos of learning could be found in something else, for instance in emancipation. This is the topic of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, a book in which a philosopher asks questions we usually ignore as irrelevant, or more precisely, as being answered long ago: are all people equally capable of learning; Is proficiency in language a requirement for acquiring knowledge; are illiterate parents able to teach their children how to read …?

The class will delve into close reading of selected passages of the book and discuss extensively its ideas.

Readings:

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Transl. Kristin Ross, Stanford: Stanford California Press, 1991.

https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/critique1313/files/2019/10/Ranciere.pdf

(original title Le Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle, published in 1987)

Consists in active participation and contribution (discursive, textual, and performative).

The module grading is based on the mentioned contribution, active in-class participation and

• - submission of written assignments (word minimum of 500 total)

• “Students from other departments or universities will be given a place on the course subject to room capacities.”