Finding convergences between two books as different as Letters By a Modern Mystic, by Frank Laubach, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, by Jacques Ranciere, may come as some surprise. The one was written towards the middle of the 20th century, and feels even closer, somehow, to the 19th--the world of sailing ships and steamers and the early days of flight. It comes from a missionary preacher on an island in the south Pacific, like something out of Joseph Conrad, writing letters home to his father in which he expresses his loneliness and his spiritual strivings. The other emerges from the atmosphere of the late 60's and 70's, with the memory of the student revolt in Paris still fresh. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, as the Game Studies Study Buddies explain in their episode on the book (and translator Kristin Ross explains in her introduction to the text), follows Ranciere's break with the Marxism of his teacher, Louis Althusser, and his turn toward alternative philosophical pathways. Not quite as mystifying as the likes of Derrida and Foucault, he contributes to the explosion of French theory here by his resurrection from obscurity of the ideas of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher of Belgian youth who devised a revolutionary method of instruction just after the French Revolution.
Dallas Willard, who helped bring Laubach and his prayerful teaching to new generations, offers throughout his works a nuanced critique of contemporary attempts, like Ranciere's, to philosophize in the absence of moral knowledge. So what do these books by such different authors have in common?
Despite the efforts of Willard and the GSSB, neither book is known as widely as it probably should be, but each is a classic within its niche. Both deal, in their different ways, with the same challenge: how teaching is possible when teachers and students lack a shared language. Quite literally, neither Laubach, as he presents himself in his letters, nor Jacotot, as conjured by Ranciere, speaks the language of the people they find themselves among. Yet each one develops a powerful, inspirational approach to the difficulty, which they share in more (Ranciere) or less (Laubach) detail through their writing.
Communication and human connection become universal for them. Jacotot accomplishes this through a philosophy and practice of equality and emancipation; Laubach, through faith renewed in a game he plays minute by minute and a focus on literacy. They come to communicate universally, both in the sense of allowing them to understand and be understood by their students--their methods rely heavily on student agency and collaboration, what Ranciere calls will and Laubach each one teach one--and in a still more capacious mode. For in the process of teaching and reflecting on their teaching, both author-personae point beyond themselves and their immediate contexts to problems of truly ultimate concern. They meditate on God, on the soul, on human relationships and the prospects for building a community in our time. They speak to the questions of transcendent significance which their teaching opens up and as it were prefigures, much as Kierkegaard in his pseudonym Climacus does in Philosophical Fragments. Like Laubach, Kierkegaard/Climacus is infused with biblical yearnings and a wish to embrace the people and perhaps be one of them, for all his sophistication and privilege. Like Ranciere/Jacotot, he is a playful stylist and lover of paradox, with something of a bone to pick with the Plato and Socrates of Meno.
We might formulate their questions about method something like this: How do we as teachers motivate people to learn? How do we learn how to teach, and teach how to learn? How, under any given circumstance, is teaching and learning possible at all?
And as far as content goes: What is it possible to know? What is it necessary to believe in?
As far as school administration: What is education for? How does our practice of schooling serve our ends, if those do include freedom and democracy?
These themes of epistemology, of avowed intellectual but still more moral and metaphysical valence--questions of the meaning of life, not to put too fine a point on it--might make us uncomfortable. We, as public school teachers and staff, whether in our daily work or professional training, are not generally asked to think about things like that. Laubach and Ranciere invite us to think on them deeply, though, and imagine with them a world where schools look very different, because they are concerned with nothing less. They might not truly expect that we will refashion our whole system around their insights and premises. Then what room would there be for spirit, and what old order to push against? But they do challenge us to examine ourselves and renew at every moment our collective and individual search for truth, our honesty in living out our beliefs.
Further reading:
Research on Ranciere and games in education by Caroline Pelletier
ProLiteracy, the organization carrying on Laubach's work
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