Reviewed by NS.

I’m a child of Asian immigrants and professionals, so intelligence matters. The stereotype is true: you must prove your intelligence at school, must prove it by getting a good job, the kind only smart people have. By doing this, your life has purpose and value. Most importantly, it will ensure that other people will realise that you are valuable.

Over time, this need to prove my intelligence became more and more of a burden, more of a psychic complex. Every year it would tarnish my interest in learning about the world, in finding in it wonder and fascination and things worth knowing.

I read The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation by Jacques Ranciere while I was at university, when I was beginning to orient myself toward Marxism. Marxism taught me that access to good test scores, good universities, and good jobs was a reflection of class and not intelligence.

But I was still not emancipated from the idea that there are hierarchies in intelligence. How many Marxists still believe in hierarchies of intelligence? Believe that Marx or Lenin were savants whose intelligence can never be matched, that people who have read Capital are smarter than those who haven’t, that maybe our leaders are inherently more intelligent and capable than us?

Whether you’ve grown up being told you’re too stupid to amount to much, or so smart you will amount to everything, you are subject to the curse of the inequality of intelligence.

The Ignorant Schoolmaster is essential reading for everyone, but it is especially essential reading for Marxists. Marxism is a revolutionary science; it is the attempt to understand the world in order to change it. So, we must be good at understanding the world. We must investigate the facts of the world, know how to synthesise them and make deductions and inferences, then make conclusions. We must know how to learn – we must learn how to learn. So how does Jacques Ranciere tell us how to learn in The Ignorant Schoolmaster?

Ranciere begins with a teaching experiment by Joseph Jacotot, a French professor who is exiled to Norway. In Norway in 1818, Jacotot teaches French to a class of Flemish students, even though the students don’t speak French and Jacotot doesn’t speak Flemish. But at the end of the subject the students can write fluently in French. How is this possible – to teach without instructing? Jacotot’s method is to provide his students with a popular and expansive French novel, Télémaque. He gives them a copy of Télémaque in its original French and a translated copy in Flemish. The students are then required, by their own volition and through their own efforts, to learn French by comparing the two copies, identifying words and sentence structures, and constantly re-reading the text until they know it off by heart. This act of fumbling, translating, identifying, and importantly memorising and repeating, allows them to learn French without having the language directly taught to them by their teacher.

Ranciere argues that this kind of learning, self-taught learning, driven by our own interest and compulsion through the text, is the very same as the kind of learning done by children. We have all learnt as children, before school, to do so many things just by copying, trying things out, failing, and being curious, all on our own and of our own volition.

But then we go to school. The pedagogy and philosophy of contemporary schooling are those of instruction. In English or Science classes, it is the teacher and not the student who first reads the text. They then distil from the text what constitute for them the key lessons, assess which lessons are at your ‘level’ and which aren’t, organise the lessons and order them for you, and teach them to you. The teacher is the intermediary between the actual texts that teach – between the novel, the research article, the textbook – and you. The teacher will show you how to think and check whether you have understood the lessons they have distilled for you. You are taught to become aware of this, this gap between yourself and the teacher. You will ask your teacher to check if you are correct instead of knowing it for yourself, to view your teacher as the savant. The student can learn but the teacher must check if they have understood.

For Ranciere, this kind of teaching subordinates one intelligence to another. It is the teacher who knows, who has in their brain the list of all things that one ought to know about a subject matter. The teacher must chew up all those important lessons and spit them out for the students who cannot chew, cannot know for themselves. The students aren’t intelligent, the teacher is intelligent. This kind of teaching is stultifying. Stultifying teaching produces students who are aware of their own inadequacy, who become used to hierarchies of intelligence, and who must prove their intelligence to the teacher (and to society) to show that they have understood and are intelligent.

But, Ranciere interjects, there is another way. Joseph Jacotot’s experiments (which expand to include subjects such as mathematics and the arts) show that the teacher doesn’t need to know. The teacher doesn’t need to subordinate the student’s intelligence to their own. In reality, the schoolmaster can be ignorant. All the teachers must do is force the student to focus, to encourage the student to exercise their own intelligence. When intelligence is conceived as an active process, as something you exercise, it becomes clear that we must apply it to a given situation in order to learn. When you exercise your intelligence, you are paying attention to the situation, trying to find out the facts, to synthesise the knowledge, and to present some opinions on why the situation is the way that it is. The teacher doesn’t give you a list of everything you must know in the situation, the teacher subordinates your will, your will to pay attention and exercise your intelligence.

This doesn’t mean that everyone immediately knows everything. You can be wrong, you can fail to pay attention to the situation properly, you can be lazy. Laziness is motivated by all kinds of things: your own self-doubt taught by years of believing in intellectual hierarchies, your own arrogance about your intelligence. But if you pay attention to the situation, if you apply yourself, if you work to think better, to research more, to ask better questions, then you ought to get closer to the truth of the situation. You must practice thinking, reading, writing, making a basket, fixing a machine, if you are to get better at it. But your practice is merely the application of an intelligence that every single human being has.

The idea of the equality of intelligence is not a nice, sparkly, but ultimately abstract philosophical idea. We can’t afford to think that Marx’s intelligence is inaccessible to us – we can all think like Marx. In fact, we must think better than Marx. We must be leaders who are attentive to the world. We must recognise the equality of our intelligence and take on the more difficult but infinitely more rewarding task of exercising our intelligence and learning on an ongoing basis. And as Marxists we have all had to apply our intelligence. We have our proof in the form of our own experience, and can attest first-hand to the reality of the equality of intelligence. We don’t have schools and universities of Marxism, and each and every one of us have had to struggle to find out about Marxism and learn about the world on our own. No matter whether we’ve had working class or petit bourgeois backgrounds, we have struggled through the texts of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and in the face of these texts we are all equals.

By spreading the idea of the equality of intelligence, we become emancipated. Emancipation doesn’t mean we can be lazy and assume we can know everything through halfhearted efforts. No, when we are emancipated, our very mode of interaction with the world changes. The world is open, it is there for all our intelligences. And we must exercise all our intelligences to know the world better, to change it. We don’t think that Marxists are better and more intelligent than the working class, we ask our working-class comrades to believe that their intelligence is equal, and to pay better attention to the world, to realise for themselves the realities of capitalism.

This is what I learnt in those final years of university. I don’t care to be smarter than anyone else, and I’m not. I want to know the world. I want to shake off hierarchies and learn to love to learn again. All those borrowed library books, with their dog ears and coffee stains, attest to the equality of the people who have held them and learned from them – we are equal before the text, before the situation, and what matters is our attention and will. The test is not whether the teacher knows I’ve understood, but whether the world will change if I’ve understood it.

I now turn to you, comrade, and say: my intelligence is equal to yours. So please can we learn about the world together, and together change it?