(Just now, typing the title of this post, I accidentally wrote “The Impotent Schoolmaster”…)

There’s something a bit Samuel Smiles-y about The Ignorant Schoolmaster’s insistence on the all-conquering virtue of the individual will, and something very Feyerabend-ish about its disdain for all figures of methodological competence. A favourite ruse of Thatcher’s intellectual minions was to refer to experts, in education and elsewhere in the public sector, as “self -appointed”; to the closed circle of experts expertly certifying the expertise of other experts, they opposed on the one hand a phantasmatic public opinion and on the other the equally spectral calculus of market forces - which supposedly could be counted on to elevate only those most deserving. One cannot accuse Ranciere of complicity with that agenda, but his polemic against the “science” of the “explicators” nevertheless evinces a pronounced preference for “common sense” and the entrepreneurial energies of individuals pursuing their own betterment.

The result is a kind of generalised hacker ethic, extolling the joys of taking apart the products of others’ intellectual labours and reassembling them in order to discover for oneself How It Is Done. By looking at a book as a phreaker might look at a telephone system, as the product of a human intelligence ultimately indiscernible from one’s own, the common reader may retrace the path of its creator’s thought by investigating the material evidence of the text. A book is a system, a material distribution of intelligence, and reading is the reactivation through close attention of the author’s intelligence within the reader. This is one of the senses in which Ranciere is able to speak of an equality of intelligence: the act of reading, so conceived, verifies the indiscernibility of intelligences, proving text-by-text that what one mind can do, another can re-do.

It is boom-time at present for “synthetic phonics”, a method of instructing children in the decipherment of the literal composition of words, which purports to teach “reading”. The method is also, it should be noted, a product for sale, a proprietory technology; so it is that those studies of its effectiveness which happen to show impressive results are pressed into service as a marketing tool, bruited to the press with great fanfare while the wider research context remains unexplored. There is political capital to be made here, too: David Cameron has promised to force the method on recalcitrant teachers, whose resistance to its immediate and universal adoption can only be due to a perverse will that children remain illiterate. Ranciere is very good on the ideology that posits that letters must be learned before words, words before sentences and so on, gradually building up the edifice of reading at the pinnacle of which the instructor stands, master of all he surveys; for Ranciere’s Jacotot, on the contrary, the entire evidence of the text is available from the very start (“everything is in everything”): the fact of the book, the compendium of traits out of which the book is composed, is the beginning of reading.