Abstract
French philosopher Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, objects to the model of “explaining teacher”. Rancière expresses the aim of this pegagogical programme, in which teacher is decentred, as “intellectual emancipation”. This objective of emancipation mandates that the student, still in the educational process, be transformed into an independent subject of knowledge and research and that education be designed in accordance with this. Intellectual emancipation here includes not just the emancipation of the student but also of the teacher. The practical postulate (or the practical axiom) that is to govern this emancipation, according to Rancière, must be the principle of the equality of intelligences. A social reality in which all hierarchies are vanished proceeds from the establishment of an egaliterian epistemological space. The function of the ignorant schoolmaster (teacher) is twofold here; setting the stage for a learning process (i.e. learning process as a research process) which is completely based on student’s independent and active use of his/her own intelligence and at the same time thereby minimizing the inegaliterian ideological ingredients of education. Yet decisive role attached, in Rancière’s approach, to the ideal of intellectual emancipation has one negative consequence; the idea of individual study, the idea that individual can discover and activate his/her powers only by his/her own independent study is one-sidedly emphasized. Accordingly, the educative role of dialogue and cooperation (both between student and student and between student and teacher) does not receive the attention it deserves.