Jacques Ranciere on books

I’ve been talking up Jacques Ranciere’s book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Here’s a quote:

The book prevents escape. The route the student will take is unknown. But we know that cannot escape: the exercise of his liberty. We know too that the master won’t have the right to stand anywhere else–only at the door. The student must see everything for himself, compare and compare, and always respect to a three-part question: what do you see? what do you think about it? what do you make of it? And so on, to infinity.