I can only say, in the most ridiculously anti-intellectual parody possible, that I don't need this kind of mumbo jumbo. It's one of those moments where you realize you're reading something great but the task at hand is almost completely utilitarian, so the gems slip by. I don't have any use for 45 pages on proof of the equality of intelligence, both because I already believe in it and because my task is to encourage it, not convince others of its existence. That sounds paradoxical, but I find that the first step should never be to tell a student that she already is smart. Getting her to do something she thought she couldn't do and then pointing it out, that's a different story. I'm getting bogged down in method and institutional teaching questions, but I still think there's a synthesis that can be cobbled together between Jacotot, Rancière, and myself.
I'm going to be teaching a course that contains a component of Latin at a brand new school in the Fall. I have a lot of flexibility in my curriculum. I'm looking at a literal word-for-word translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, imagining an Animus fert dicere formas mutatas moment, akin to the Calypso could not that Jacotot began with. We'll see we'll see . . .
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