In 1818, Joseph Jacotot, an exiled revolutionary and reader of French literature at the University of Leuven, began to spread panic in learned Europe. Not content with having taught French to Flemish students without giving them any courses, he began to teach what he did not know and to proclaim the slogan of intellectual emancipation: all men have equal intelligence. You can learn alone, without an explanatory teacher, and a poor and ignorant father of a family can be the instructor of his son. Instruction is like freedom: it is not given, but taken. It is taken away from the monopolists of intelligence sitting on the explanatory throne. It is enough to recognize yourself and any other speaker the same power. The Ignorant Teacher is not a book about fun pedagogy, but about philosophy and, if you like, politics. Reason only feeds on equality. But social fiction only feeds on ranks and their tireless explanation. To those who speak of emancipation and equality of intelligence, it responds by promising progress and the reduction of inequalities: there is still a little more explanation, commissions, reports and reforms, and we will achieve it. The pedagogized society is before us.