Joseph Jacotot - Teaching Method

Teaching Method

His emancipatory or panecastic (French: panécastique "everything in each" from Greek πᾶν and ἕκαστον) method was not only adopted in several institutions in Belgium, but also met with some approval in France, England, Germany, and Russia. It was based on four principles:

1. all men have equal intelligence;
2. every man has received from God the faculty of being able to instruct himself;
3. we can teach what we don't know;
4. everything is in everything.

Regarding the first principle, he maintained that it is only in the will to use their intelligence that men differ. His own process, depending on the third principle, was to give a student learning a language for the first time a short passage of a few lines, and to encourage the pupil to study first the words, then the letters, then the grammar, then the meaning, until a single paragraph became the occasion for learning an entire literature. After the revolution of 1830 Jacotot returned to France, and he died in Paris on 30 July 1840.

Jacotot described his system in Enseignement universel (universal education), langue maternelle (Louvain and Dijon, 1823)—which passed through several editions—and in various other works; and he also advocated his views in the Journal de l’êmancipation intellectuelle and elsewhere. For a complete list of his works and fuller details regarding his career, see Biographie de J. Jacotot, by Achille Guillard (Paris, 1860).

Jacotot's career and principles are also described by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford University Press, 1991).