ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
combining the student/ teacher position. The most celebrated theoretical
model for this is Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), in
which he examines the case of maverick nineteenth- century teacher
Joseph Jacotot, who is French, but finds himself teaching a class that
speaks exclusively Flemish. 49 They have no language in common, rendering
impossible a straightforward transmission of knowledge; Jacotot
resolves this by reading a bilingual book with the class, painstakingly
comparing the French and Flemish texts. What interests Rancière is not
the successful outcome of this task (the students learning to speak French,
or their understanding of the content of the book) but Jacotot’s presumption
of an equality of intelligence between himself and his students. The
point, for Rancière, is not to prove that all intelligence is equal, but to see
what can be achieved under that supposition. For Rancière, equality is a
method or working principle, rather than a goal: equality is continually
verified by being put into practice. The Ignorant Schoolmaster was written
against the backdrop of educational changes taking place in France
during the 1980s, but it is also, like much of Rancière’s writing, a rejection
of his own former teacher, Louis Althusser, who understood
education to be a transmission of knowledge to subjects who do not have
this knowledge. 50
Rancière’s book has been frequently cited in recent discussions of art
and pedagogy – albeit more for its catchy title and case- study of Jacotot
than for its theorisation of equality – but it is striking that his polemic
makes no reference to the emergence of critical pedagogy in the late
1960s, which attempted to empower subjects through very similar
means. 51 One of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire’s
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), calls into question the ‘banking’ model
of education, by which teachers deposit information into pupils to
produce manageable subjects under a paternalistic social apparatus – a
technique that reinforces oppression rather than granting the students
consciousness of their position as historical subjects capable of producing
change. Freire in Latin America, like Henry Giroux in the US, proposes
the teacher as a co- producer of knowledge, facilitating the student’s
empowerment through collective and non- authoritarian collaboration.
Unlike Rancière, it is significant that Freire maintains that hierarchy can
never be entirely erased: ‘Dialogue does not exist in a political vacuum.
It is not a “free space” where you say what you want. Dialogue takes
place inside some programme and content. These conditioning factors
create tension in achieving goals that we set for dialogic education.’ In
other words, critical pedagogy retains authority, but not authoritarianism:
‘Dialogue means a permanent tension between authority and liberty.
But, in this tension, authority continues to be because it has authority visà-
vis permitting student freedoms which emerge, which grow and mature
precisely because authority and freedom learn self- discipline.’ 52 Freire’s
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