The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation is a 1987 book by philosopher Jacques Rancière on the role of the teacher and individual towards individual liberation. Rancière uses the example of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher in the late 18th century who taught in Belgium without knowledge of their language (Flemish), to explain the role of liberation after Marxism. The work expresses Rousseauist ideas, e.g. in the state of nature humans are morally good, and emphasizes that individual change precipitates societal change. Its arguments draw heavily from the French socialist party's debates on education during the 1980s. It was translated to English in 1991 by Kristin Ross. Writing Style Rancière's philosophy informs his writing style. Rancière tells the story of 18th century French teacher Joseph Jacotot without explicit commentary. Translator Kristin Ross sees the book as uniting Rancière's archival-narrative and polemical styles (xxiii). She considers that the book may be a satirical polemic against modern sociology, targeting specifically the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu, Rancière's teacher Louis Althusser, and Jean-Claude Milner (xxiii). The book is a historical moment intervening politically in the present; this is effected by Rancière blurring his voice with that of Jacotot (xxi-ii). Rancière's choice to write the book as a story reflects his rejection of explication, teaching and writing which presumes an intellectual inequality between the writer and reader (xxii). Translator Kristen Ross writes: "The very act of storytelling, an act that presumes in its interlocutor an equality of intelligence rather than an inequality of knowledge, posits equality, just as the act of explication posits inequality" (xxii). The book is equally relevant to history as to philosophy of education; in the U.S. Rancière is best known among historians (xxi). Main Concepts Stultifying Master vs. Emancipatory Master The explicator, "having thrown a veil of ignorance over everything that is to be learned, he appoints himself to the task of lifting it" (6-7). Only by concealing knowledge from the student is the explicator able to teach it. This makes the student dependent on the master. Rancière also calls this "Enforced stultification" (7). The emancipatory master, on the other hand, teaches students only that he has nothing to teach them. This emancipates students from their dependence on explicators. However, this does not mean no master is necessary (12). What is emancipation? "We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations-- the act of an intelligence obeying only