The master teacher Joseph Jacotot teaches what he does not know and proclaims the joyful message of intellectual emancipation: All people are equally intelligent. Jacques Rancière traces the philosophy of intellectual emancipation and presents it to our pedagogized and inequality-ridden society. In 1818, Joseph Jacotot, an exiled revolutionary and lecturer in French literature at the University of Leuven, began to spread panic in learned Europe: Not content with having taught Flemish students French without a single lesson, he taught what he was ignorant of and proclaimed the motto of intellectual emancipation: All people are equally intelligent. This is not amusing pedagogy, but philosophy and, if you will, politics. Reason thrives only on equality.