The Ignorant Schoolmaster

To teach what one doesn’t know is simply to ask questions about what one doesn’t know.

— Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster

In the late 18th century, the French educator and philosopher of education Joseph Jacotot developed a new method of teaching he called ‘intellectual emancipation’. This method involved a paradoxically anti-pedagogical approach to pedagogy; Jacotot’s thesis was that all people were equipped with equal intelligence, and differed only in their will to put that intellect to use. What’s more, he argued, all knowledge could begin, in principle from any and all things. As such, all people were equally capable of teaching themselves, given resource and prompting by questions, and the role of the educator was not to act as the gatekeeper to knowledge, reinforcing the - in Jacotot’s view false - impression that the teacher/pupil hierarchy was a necessary condition of learning. Teaching French to Flemish schoolchildren in Belgium, Jacotot did not tell the students how the language worked, or encourage rote learning — instead, he would have them study a passage from a book, studying words, grammar, and eventually meaning by themselves, and expanding from this such that that passage would ultimate constitute the origin point and tool for their acquisition of an entire language. And crucially, this process of knowledge acquisition would have been largely autodidactic, even if to some extent steered or enabled by Jacotot, producing learners that were emancipated by their knowledge rather than interpreting it as something bestowed by a superior. What this meant too, was that anything could be taught by anyone — if teaching was not a question of concealing and then revealing knowledge, then to ‘know’ something was not a prerequisite of teaching it.

Jacques Rancière, the contemporary French philosopher, would go on to write about Jacotot in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Le maître ignorant, 1987). Rancière built on Jacotot’s methodology to propose ‘universal teaching’ as a method in which there would be not be a class of ‘learned’ teachers presenting knowledge to students in a particular and limited way, but a class of ‘emancipated’ students, with the ability to exercise and develop their own intelligence in any given direction. The role of teachers would be to make students aware of this ability, to bolster their will to ‘emancipate’ themselves in this way. The teacher’s role is not really to teach anything, or to impart knowledge; in fact, it is to show that the range of their own knowledge has no bearing on what that student is able to learn, that the latter’s intellect can expand and grow while following none but itself, and that students themselves can be teachers on only one condition; that this emancipation of intelligence is achieved.

This may not seem, immediately, to have much to do with coding, but as we go into week 5 of Makers I have been thinking a lot about the shape and nature of this learning process, and Jacotot and Rancière’s work on education keeps coming to mind. It strikes me that the Makers emphasis on self-led learning has a lot in common with Jacotot’s approach. This is not, of course, to cast doubt on the depth of knowledge of our wonderful coaches, but it is certainly true that we are encouraged as far as possible, even if guided by prompts and further questions, to seek answers for ourselves, from resources or from each other, and only to defer to the ‘explicatory’ mode of teaching, what we might call the ‘please can you just tell me the answer’ mode, as a last resort. Whilst that can lead to a draining amount of time spent trying to fix problems you don’t fully understand, I have also found that it leads to a sense of empowerment when those problems are resolved or a question is answered— an empowerment that would be lacking if it was just a question of consulting an answer book. What’s more, being able to cope with not understanding a problem, and being able to fix it all the same, seem more and more to constitute perhaps the most skill base of software development. We start our first group project this week — MakersBnB, a clone of AirBnB- and it was pointed out in a team discussion this morning that we’re hardly going to come out of this course with a finished learning process. We probably won’t feel like we really know what we’re doing until 6 months into a first job, and even then, as coding languages and practices adapt and change, and as we develop as developers (is this a pun? unsure), we will still be constantly coming into problems effectively blind, working with syntax and structures we’ve never encountered before. The hope is that Makers will have given us the skills not simply to cope with this situation, but to flourish within it, knowing that we absolutely can teach ourselves.

Pairing, too, encourages us to see ourselves as members of a flat hierarchy of teacher/learners, in which everyone is both one and the other at the same time. Every pair partner I’ve had over the past 4 weeks has helped me learn something (indeed, many things). I’d like to think I’ve helped others learn too, though as someone who likes to lead, there’s certainly a lesson for me from both pairing and from Jacotot, in the importance of sitting back and giving others space to follow their own intellectual process. Nobody likes a backseat driver — whilst it might be worth reaching over and seizing the wheel if someone looks like they’re about to do whatever the coding equivalent of driving off the road is, it’s probably not the right approach if they’re doing 38 mph where you would be doing 37, or shifting gear slightly sooner than you might have done, or taking a slightly different approach from you to parallel parking.

None of this is to say that I don’t think explanation is sometimes needed, or that I haven’t had several moments of ‘please can you just tell me the answer’ desperation. Sometimes, instructions are necessary; the workshops we’ve had have been incredibly useful and important introductions to particular processes and areas, as well as providing the opportunity to ask questions of those who do, at the end of the day, have a lot more experience of this than we do. And last week, which involved the consolidation of web skills from the previous week, a week I had found fairly tough, and the introduction of an entirely new area in working with SQL and databases, I think we all found ourselves consulting the challenge walkthroughs pretty frequently, whether to figure out if we were on the right track or to even get on the track in the first place. Still, as the weeks progress further, no doubt we’ll each build on what we’ve taken from these resources in our own way. These walkthroughs, and the code attached to them, are like the passages of French Jacotot would give his students to help them learn the language, a vital and necessary tool, but one to be independently applied; something from which we might draw a guiding framework rather than a canonical resource.

So, onto MakersBnB, in the spirit not of ‘finishing’ the challenge, but of emancipated learning. I’m excited, this week, to work with a consistent team, and for the feeling of working on and achieving something as a collective; pairing over the past month, has, I think, been crucial preparation for this. A huge thank you to all my pair partners from the last 4 weeks, for helping me develop, but also, I should note, for providing interesting, funny conversations and putting up with my bad jokes. You have all born this heavy burden with incredible patience and grace. I salute you.