Joseph Jacotot
Jean Joseph Jacotot ( born March 4, 1770 in Dijon, † 30 July 1840 in Paris) was a French scholar and founder of the eponymous method of teaching.
Life
Jacotot studied at the College of his native city. After successful completion followed many professions which he exercised but usually only for a short time; inter alia, he was a lawyer, professor of humanity sciences, captain of artillery, secretary in the War Department, deputy director and later a lecturer in mathematics École polytechnique and finally a professor of French language and literature at the Imperial University of Leuven.
1830 receipted Jacotot his office at the University of Leuven, returned to France and settled in Paris.
Teaching method
Since 1818 Jacotot entered into lions out with his method of universal education, which many followers, especially in Belgium, France and Switzerland, but also weighty opponents, especially in Germany ( Alberti, C. Schwarz and others ) found.
Jacotot had come by accident to his new method. Not the Dutch powerful, he had to teach at the University of Leuven students who in turn did not understand French. As a useful bridge proved to be a bilingual edition of Telemachus by François Fénelon. The students were found to be capable, without further explanation by studying the text and its translation to understand the functioning of the French phrases and speak in French about the content. This surprising experience became the impetus for the development of his method and the questioning of fundamental assumptions of pedagogy.
" The explanation is not necessary, in order to remedy an inability to understand. This inability is on the contrary the structuring fiction of the explanatory conception of the world. The explanatory needs the incapable, not vice versa. He is the one who creates the unfit as such. To tell someone something, it means he was the first to prove that he can not understand it on its own. "
Jacotot went from the sets of " All people have equal intelligence" and " All in all ". He searched the whole of human intelligence in every intellectual phenomenon.
The adoption of intellectual equality is characterized by Jacotot itself as an assumption. He do not put it as a new dogma of the old Doxa of the intellectual inequality contrary, but shows that it leads to very different educational and political consequences.
Jacotots method proved to be very effective. But for Jacotot itself was not about to develop a better method of learning to read, but to emancipate the people intellectually.
Jacotots method was reduced to a mere reading teaching method and so brought to its critical point in the reception. Found in Germany the so- reduced method Jacotots since 1840 input by Karl Seltzsam in Breslau and later in a slightly modified form ( in normal words justified) by Karl bird in Leipzig, which was independently reached similar principles as Jacotot.
Works (selection)
In this modified form it is widely used under the name of normal words, bird Böhme 's or sweeping Schlimbachschen method. Jacotots Enseignement universel was translated several times, eg by Wilhelm Braubach ( The Universal Teaching, Marburg. 1830, with explanations, repr. ISBN 978-3-11-130636-0 ) by JPKrieger (universal teaching or learning and teachings on the nature method Containing: . Jacotot 's collected writings, together with the additions to the later editions of the same, the reports of Kinker, Froussard, Boutmy, Baudouin etc., the letters of the Duke of Levis, and others the principles and results of the method explanatory documents, Zweibrücken, 1833, G.Ritter ) and in selection of Goering (Vienna 1883).
Secondary literature
Jacques Rancière: The ignorant teacher. Five lessons about intellectual emancipation, Vienna: passages, 2nd edition 2009