ABSTRACT
The article discusses the ideas presented by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987/2002) as to their possible relations with the production and circulation of textbooks for primary and secondary education. Particularly, we observe how textbooks can reinforce what the author calls the logic of explanation, intensifying the hierarchy of intelligences and the condition of inequality for the sake of an equality yet to come, but also how they can interrupt this logic, functioning as a mediating instance between two wills working under only one intelligence: that which enables both teacher and student to learn and teach what they still do not know. In order to support our discussion, we take as reference a few excerpts from national official documents concerning the design of foreign language textbooks.
textbook; logic of explanation; Jacques Rancière