A second resource is a book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, by Jacques Rancière (translated 1991, Stanford University Press). Rancière makes a strong statement that all learners are equal - you don't learn in order to become equal. The dominant approach to schooling, where the learned explain to the unlearned, stultifies rather than teaches. The book is base on a narrative about the ignorant schoolmaster, Jacotot, who finds the best method to teach, is a measure of ignorance, and to let students teach themselves. The translator of the book, Kristin Ross, points out in the introduction that this was written after the period of the 1968 student rebellion in France, and thus at a similar time to the scholarly productions of Pierre Bourdieu. The introduction points to criticism of Bourdieu by Rancière, that Bourdieu's writing "allowed the denunciation of both the mechanisms of domination and the illusions of liberation" (xi). I won't go into the details of this logic here, suffice it to say that I agree that it is easy to use critique of the structure of society and its relations with schooling to perpetuate a kind of cynicism and lack of belief in the possibility of change that can lead to both social and cognitive justice. This cynicism and what I would call 'cognitive conservatism' has permeated my own thinking for decades while working in the field of teaching and learning in higher education, and is one of the reasons why I find the student calls for the decolonisation of knowledge so invigorating.
Why are these resources so significant at this point in time? Simply, there must be a way to advance cognitive justice in and through education, and present methods are not sufficiently facilitating this. The answers that we seek should contain considerations of both social and cognitive justice, matters of power and privilege, but also thoughtful considerations of how people learn in various contexts, in which schooling is more, as well as less pedagogically structured.
Carol Black, http://carolblack.org/schooling-the-world/
Sugata Mitra, https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud?language=en.
Jacques Rancière, 1991, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford University Press.
Richard Stamp, 2013, Of Slumdogs and Schoolmasters: Jacotot, Rancière and Mitra on Self-organised Learning, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45, 6).