Policy and а method of intellectual emancipation

The article analyzes Jacques Rancière’s work “Le Maître ignorant : Cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle”, where the author refers to the educational experience of a French teacher Joseph Jacotot. In his work, Rancière not only criticize the methods of traditional education, but going beyond a purely pedagogical dimension he develops Jacotot's ideas and transfers them to the sphere of social and political relations, revealing that not only the school reproduces student’s dependent position from a teacher, but also the State by means of the conventional strategy of education supports an established social order, negating the individual potential of each citizen (just like a “competent” mentor does it with an “uneducated” student by means of “explanation”). In his provocative criticism Rancière (together with Jacotto) tries to demonstrate the possibility of a different kind of relationship between teacher and student, when each of them is at an equal distance from the source of knowledge. And revealing the potential of the “ignorant” mentor, Rancière strives to reach a new level of relationships between them by comprehending the society within which these moral agents operate.