The Ignorant Schoolmaster Synopsis

Master = teacher

Explication = explanation

The story looks at an unintentionally conducted experiment by Mr Joseph Jacotot, a tutor in French literature,  in which he let – ‘enabled’ his students to learn French without teaching them the language. Initially, only Joseph Jacotot could understand French, while the students could solely comprehend Flemish. In order to make his students learn French, he lent them the bilingual edition of Telemaque, written in French and Flemish. The outcome was successful that it exceeded Jacotot expectations; For a long time  Jacotet used to believe that ‘the important business of the master is to transmit his knowledge to his students so as to bring them, by degrees, to his own level of conscientious professors’. However, the Flemish  students did make a significant progress and managed to write a review of the Telemaque in French without Jacotot teaching . Through this experiment Jacotot realised that it is possible to learn a language by yourself without the need of thorough explanation.

By referring to the idea of a  mother tongue, the author shows an example of learning without the  explication  by a master. Humans learn their mother tongue from  ‘hearing and retaining, imitating and repeating, making mistakes and correcting themselves’. Although they are too young to be thought by a master, they are able to learn their parent’s language using their own human intelligence. However, let’s be conscious:  it’s easy to make the child dependant on an explicated learning process but that will later constrain him from understanding a particular thing unless he is explained it  to. Therefore, in a later life, learning is not about  following blindly someone’s words but about pure understanding and methodological research.

‘It says that there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one. The former registers perception by chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need. This is the intelligence of young child and the common man. The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is the intelligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the student has satisfactorily understood what he learned. Such is the principle of explication.’

Jacotot described the explication learning as ‘enforced stultification’, therefore a numbing  process of explaining  the  knowledge to students in a muddle-headed way –  based  principally on master’s own understanding. He further concluded that ‘the act of learning could be produced according to four variously combined determinations: by an emancipatory master of by a stultifying one, by a learned master or by an ignorant one.’

‘One could learn by oneself and without a master explicator when one wanted to, propelled by one’s own desire or by the constraints of the situation’

Ultimately, the author makes a case that learning is not about intelligence of the person, it is about the will to learn. In other words, a person can be highly intelligent but with no desire to acquire  more knowledge about a subject – ignorance stops them from pursuing further knowledge.