In recent studies in the field of eduational sociology it is argued that social inequality has grown the last decennia and that it is time to finally choose for democratic education at the start of the 21st century. At the same time, European policy makers stress that equality has to be made into a major imperative of educational policy. They think it is of crucial policy interest how education policies affect the educational opportunities of children from various family backgrounds. Hence, equality is a major topic in education today. But it is not a new topic in the field, on the contrary. A lot has been written on the relation between equality and egalitarian/democratic education, both in terms of how education can serve social equality and of how teachers can engage in an egalitarian/emancipatory educational relation with pupils. Most of these studies refer to social equality as education’s goal and make it into an issue of educational policy. Teachers and policymakers need to obtain the required knowledge or expertise to reach equal outcomes, which means breaking the correlation between social background and school results of the pupils. The thesis underlying this paper, which I take from the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, is that equality is not to be seen as a goal, but that equality of intelligence is the first assumption (opinion d’’égalité) to start with. Inasmuch as Rancière holds to the assumption of equality of intelligences, he does not ascribe a deep essence to human beings, nor does he want to prove that all intelligence is equal. His ambition is to see what can be done under the assumption of equality of intelligences and therefore it is enough for this assumption to be possible. The aim of this paper is to explore what teachers can do when they start from the assumption of equality of intellegences. Rancière gives in Le Maître Ignorant (1987) (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1991) an indication of what it means to act under this condition by telling the story about Joseph Jacotot, who he calls an emancipated master. In this paper I will elaborate what the emancipated master does and argue that acting according to the assumption of equality needs to be considered in relation to the pedagogical mastership of the teacher. Pedagogical mastership, here, is not referring to the knowledge or the expertise of the teacher but to a particular attitude that implies a certain ‘work on the self’ or ‘care of the self’.

That equality is not to be seen as a goal, but that equality of intelligence is the first assumption (opinion d’’égalité) to start with is also the underlying hypothesis for the development of a particular research method which Rancière calls ‘poetics of knowledge’ (poétique du savoir). I will elaborate this method and relate it to the young tradition of empirical philosophy.

I will argue that equality in education is not to be considered as an issue of policy, but as an issue of the pedagogical mastership of the teacher. Futhermore, I want to indicate that the conception of equality as an issue of the pedagogical dimension of mastership opens interesting roads to do empirical research – and I mainly think of empirical philosophy - about the pedagogical dimension of teaching.