This article argues that the concept and practice of ‘self-organized learning’, as pioneered by Sugata Mitra (and his team) in the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiments (1999–2005) that inspired the novel Q & A (2006) and the resulting movie, Slumdog millionaire (2008) bear direct, but not uncritical comparison with Jacques Rancière’s account of ‘universal teaching’ discovered by maverick nineteenth century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. In both cases, it is argued, there is a deliberate dissociation of two functions of ‘teaching’ that are often conflated: (...) knowledge and mastery. Mitra’s development of computer-mediated learning among the supposedly ‘ignorant’ of India’s slums, and Rancière’s insistence on equality as a presupposition rather than a goal, both emphasize the agency of the student at the centre of learning, but in ways that displace both established pedagogical methods of ‘explication’ and the neoliberal ideology of ‘schooling’ as the harmonizing of individual and social functions of education. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Rancière I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be characterised as education which starts from the assumption that all students can speak. It starts from the assumption, in (...) other words, that students neither lack a capacity for speech, nor that they are producing noise. The idea of the student as a speaker is not offered as an empirical fact but as a different starting point for emancipatory education, one that positions equality at the beginning of education, not at its end. (shrink)