Publish at June 08 2020 Updated December 03 2025
According to legend, a man asked Cocteau "If your house burned down and you could only save one thing, what would you take with you?" And Cocteau replied "Fire".
This answer is so powerful that I carry it with me all the time. And what would I choose for teaching? I asked myself this question, but I gave myself some leeway, because it's too hard to make just one choice. I asked myself, if I only had 3 pedagogical books to take with me, which ones would I take with me? After a thorough examination of my library, I decided on :
It's a choice I've made from the heart, from the works that have most influenced my practice, perhaps because they form a meaningful triptych between the person, the teacher and the experience.
"On becoming a person" is one of Carl Rogers' many works, and certainly his best-known, revealing the depth of his philosophy. For him, every being has an instinct for fulfillment. From then on, it's a matter of treating the other person not as a subordinate, but as a person ready to unfold. It's about helping others to be themselves, rather than trying to inculcate their own beliefs.
All Rogers' therapeutic work consists in facilitating understanding of the meaning of one's life, in order to become oneself. And to be oneself is to be in the process of becoming oneself. It's an ongoing process of self-transformation, under the unconditionally welcoming eye and ear of a third party.
For Rogers, the individual develops the responsibility to take responsibility for his or her choices and mode of existence; this leads to the development of creative capacities and the building of a life based on one's own values. Rogers' therapeutic approach advocates a relationship of confirmation of the other, and thus acceptance of all his or her potential. It's a relationship of potential to potential, or person to person. It requires self-acceptance, in order to shed fear and gain autonomy. It's a process of humanization.
"True humanization is a complex process that makes us one of the most sensitive, responsive, creative and agreeable creatures on the planet. A key notion for Rogers is empathy, which strives to understand the other for what he or she is, without seeking to pity or judge. There is no affective or emotional fusion with the other. The empathic understanding at work in the cure helps the other person to be aware of what he or she is. This is the basis of authentic communication.
Finally, for Rogers, the function of education is to develop the creativity inherent in every person. He distrusts rigid institutions that inhibit individual potential. He expresses this belief: "I have come to believe that the only knowledge that can influence an individual's behavior is that which he himself discovers and appropriates". He calls for the master to be erased.
Philosopher Jacques Rancière's Le maître ignorant was published in 1987. It's a lesson in intellectual emancipation. The story is so beautiful that it almost sounds like a fable. In the 19th century, a teacher(Jacotot) is forced to leave his homeland and settle in Holland, a country whose language he doesn't know. However, he tries to make a living from his profession. How can an ignorant master teach in a foreign language? The magic of learning happens.
By what miracle, when the vehicle of knowledge, language, is furiously diminished? By what miracle, when even the content of knowledge is unknown to the teacher? And what if the teacher's low posture unlocks hidden potential? Without words and content, explanation (the foundation of traditional education) is impossible. Vertical explanation from master to pupil is the basis of education based on transmission, even if it proves divisive, as it separates those who know from those who don't, those who teach from those who listen and are supposed to learn, based on the well-known adage "I teach, so you learn".
"Before being the act of the pedagogue, the explanation is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided between learned and ignorant minds, mature and immature minds, capable and incapable, intelligent and stupid."
This organization of relations to knowledge sediments a subordination between explainer and listener, who will internalize more than content, a posture of submission to the authority of the magisters. The master is more than a connoisseur; a master who emancipates lets the other use his own intelligence, even feeds off his questions; he is content to be beside him, to take an interest in him and see him develop. If the master feeds off questions, he feeds off them in return to the other, with a single question "and you, what do you think?".
For one commentator on the work, Cerletti, Rancière "warns us that there is no one person who has to tell us how things are and what we should do; he only insists that we are capable of thinking and doing. The inability to arrive at something on one's own is like a structuring fiction that must exist to give a foundation to the explanation".
Stupidity is the perfect correspondence of the intelligences and desires of master and pupil; emancipation, on the contrary, is made up of gaps. To succeed in establishing a gap is to make oneself capable of starting from one's own experience.
Joelle Zask gives us a penetrating insight into an immense pedagogue: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 to 1952. Dewey's pragmatism is extraordinary. It is rooted in experience as both end and means.
For Dewey, experience is a breach in the continuum of our existence at times of doubt, trouble or distress. The feeling of this experience enhances or diminishes our capacity to act, depending on whether we transcend it and pay attention to it or not. Action is therapeutic. It enables us to deal with the breach.
Beyond the subject/object dichotomy, the act of experiencing is linked to the object of the experience. Then, action stems from a plan to be invented, an idea to be tested, a plan of action of sorts to re-establish the continuum of our existence for a time interrupted by the breach. Action is not always conclusive, but presupposes the freedom to choose and commit. Experience is a resource for learning and building oneself as an individual. Use depends on the user's freedom.
At the same time as it personalizes use, it refines the user's personality. From then on, the object of use is an invitation, and the individual is the experimenter, who has an opportunity to learn. Experience is an interaction between the individual and resources. But the obstacles to experience vary from place to place and time to time. In all cases, experience is created by interaction; it is not given, it depends on :
Reflexivity is essential if experience is to enable recovery on the continuum between suffering and action.
Experience is not just an individual experience. It is an experience of oneself (initiative), an experience by oneself (immersion) and an experience for oneself (perceived consequence). Through this triple pathway, the individual converts his or her experience for subsequent applications. To deprive the learner of the possibility of initiating, conducting and integrating his singular experience is to make instruction, and the learner, an object of instruction.
For Dewey, experience is the only way to build individuality. The individual is more than an actor. The individual is scriptwriter and director. To bring experience to fruition, the individual must enter into dialogue with reality. He must make the effort to exist and express his conatus. Experience is not grafted onto the individual; experience and individuality are linked. Individuals are what they do. Experience is not an attribute; the individual is the result of his experiences. Experimentation establishes a relationship with a variety of objects and places. There is more than intersubjectivity in the construction of the individual; places and spaces are part of the context of experience.
When it comes to learning, embracing experience is at its heart. If perception contains an element of unpredictability (Ralph Waldo Emerson), it is nevertheless possible to turn our perceptions into material, to consider them and train ourselves to intensify them. As our perceptions are unpredictable, we must learn to deal with this unpredictability. Perception is fatal - it comes from the outside world.
Experience, individuality and democracy are synonymous for Dewey and are revealed in the experimental method. Sask quotes a Dewey text from 1939, "I believe", which sums up his thinking: "Individuals will always be the center and crowning achievement of experience" and "only the voluntary initiative and voluntary cooperation of individuals can produce social institutions that will protect the freedoms necessary to accomplish the development of true individuality".
Regarding the link between democracy and education Dewey reminds us:
"A democratic society must, to be consistent with its ideal, make room for intellectual freedom and the free play of diverse gifts and interests in its educational system" (John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1990)
After reading these three works of pedagogical wisdom, I feel better able to answer Cocteau's question. I know what I'll take with me: ignorance.
Sources
On becoming a person - Le développement de la personne - Carl Rogers
https://books.google.ca/books/about/On_Becoming_a_Person.html?id=0yHBXXhJbKQC&redir_esc=y
Le maître ignorant - Five lessons on intellectual emancipation - Jacques Rancière
https://www.decitre.fr/livre-pod/le-maitre-ignorant-9782213019253.html
Democracy and Education - Follow-up to Experience and Education - John Dewey
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/democratie-et-education-9782200621896.html
Book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_uaI28LGJk
JohnDewey - un pédagogue aux multiples facettes - Joelle Zask h
ttp ://4cristol.over-blog.com/2019/04/redecouvrez-john-dewey-un-pedagogue-aux-multiples-facettes.html
Wikipedia - Jacque Rancière - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ranci%C3%A8re
CANOPE - John Dewey, American philosopher of education
https://www.reseau-canope.fr/savoirscdi/societe-de-linformation/le-monde-du-livre-et-de-la-presse/histoire-du-livre-et-de-la-documentation/biographies/john-dewey-philosophe-americain-de-leducation.html
Lycée Lecorbusier - Jacotot - https://www.lyceelecorbusier.eu/pratiques-pedagogies/?p=219
Cerletti Alejandro, "La politique du maître ignorant: la leçon de Rancière", Le Télémaque, 2005/1 (n° 27), p. 81-88. DOI : 10.3917/tele.027.0081. URL:
https://www.cairn.info/revue-le-telemaque-2005-1-page-81.htm
France Culture - Democracy and education - https://www.franceculture.fr/oeuvre/democratie-et-education
Daval René, "Les fondements philosophiques de la pensée de Carl Rogers", Approche Centrée sur la Personne. Pratique et recherche, 2008/2 (n° 8), p. 5-20. DOI : 10.3917/acp.008.0005.
URL: https: //www.cairn.info/revue-approche-centree-sur-la-personne-2008-2-page-5.htm
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