Jean Joseph Jacotot

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Jean Joseph Jacotot

Jean Joseph Jacotot (born March 4, 1770 in Dijon , † July 30, 1840 in Paris ) was a French scholar and founder of the teaching method named after him.

Life

Jacotot studied at the college in his hometown. After successfully completing a number of professions followed, but mostly only held for a short time; u. a. he was a lawyer , professor of humanities, captain of the artillery, secretary in the war ministry, deputy director and later lecturer in mathematics at an École polytechnique and most recently professor of French language and literature at the University of Leuven .

In 1830 Jacotot resigned from the University of Leuven , returned to France and settled in Paris.

Teaching method

From 1818 Jacotot emerged in Leuven with his method of universal instruction, which found many supporters, especially in Belgium, France and Switzerland, but also serious opponents, especially in Germany (Alberti, Chr. Schwarz et al.).

Jacotot had found his new method by chance. Not knowing Dutch, he had to teach students at the University of Leuven who, in turn, did not understand French. A bilingual edition of Telemach by François Fénelon proved to be a useful bridge . The students were shown to be able, without further explanation, by studying the text and its translation, to understand the workings of the French sentences and to speak about the content in French. This surprising experience became the impetus for the elaboration of his method and the questioning of fundamental assumptions of pedagogy.

“The explanation is not necessary to remedy an inability to understand. On the contrary, this inability is the structuring fiction of the explanatory conception of the world. The explainer needs the incompetent, not the other way around. It is he who creates the incapable as such. To explain something to someone means to first prove to them that they cannot understand it on their own. "

Jacotot started from the sentences “All people have the same intelligence” and “Everything is in everything”. He sought the whole of human intelligence in every intellectual appearance.

The assumption of intellectual equality is marked as an assumption by Jacotot himself. He does not oppose it as a new dogma to the old doxa of intellectual inequality, but rather shows that it leads to completely different educational and political consequences.

Jacotot's method turned out to be very effective. For Jacotot himself, however, it was not about developing a better method of learning to read, but about emancipating people intellectually.

"What dumbs down the people is not their lack of instruction, but the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence."

In the reception, Jacotot's method was reduced to a mere reading teaching method and thus deprived of its critical punch line. In Germany, Jacotot's method, reduced in this way, was introduced in 1840 by Karl Seltzsam in Breslau and later in a slightly different form (based on normal words) by Johann Karl Christoph Vogel in Leipzig, who independently arrived at similar principles to Jacotot.

Works (selection)

In this modified form it is widely used under the name of the normal words, Vogel-Böhmeschen or Kehr-Schlimbachschen method. Jacotot's Enseignement universel has been translated several times, e.g. B. by Wilhelm Braubach ( The universal teaching , Marburg. 1830, with explanations, repr. ISBN 978-3-11-130636-0 ), by JPKrieger ( universal teaching or learning and teaching according to the natural method. Contains: All Jacotot's writings together with the additions to the later editions of the same, the reports by Kinker, Froussard, Boutmy, Baudouin, etc., the letters from the Duke of Levis, and other documents explaining the principles and results of the method , Zweibrücken, 1833, G. Ritter ) and selected by Göring (Vienna 1883).

Secondary literature

Jacques Rancière : The ignorant teacher. Five lessons on intellectual emancipation , Vienna: Passages, 2nd edition 2009

proof

  1. ↑ Rancière 2009: 16
  2. ↑ Rancière 2009: 53
  3. ↑ cf. on recuperation Rancière 2009: 119ff.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Jacotot, Jean Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Pedagogue
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1770
PLACE OF BIRTH Dijon
DATE OF DEATH July 30, 1840
Place of death Paris