Editorial Our Passion for Ignorance RUBÉN GAZTAMBIDE-FERNÁNDEZ Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Qu’on néglige, et qu’on ne nomme pas parmi les composantes primaires du transfert—l’ignorance en tant que passion.... Pas d’entrée possible dans l’analyse sans cette référence—on ne le dit jamais, on n’y pense jamais, alors qu’elle est fondamentale. (Lacan, quoted in Vanier, 2004, p. 64) The traditional and normative view of learning and teaching that has been institutionalized in formal schooling is premised on three interrelated ideas about knowledge. First, what is worth knowing about the totality of human experience can not only be named, but also parsed and organized into discrete units of knowledge. Second, these units of knowledge can be either predictably transmitted from teacher to student or, at best, deliber- ately constructed through interactions between them. Third, what the students know can be assessed through observed behaviours in either standardized or more open and organic forms of performance. The aim of education is to come to know, and the only thing that matters for learning is knowing. Yet, what if ignorance was in fact more or at least as important as knowing in the process of schooling? What if ignorance was not a state to be removed on the path to knowing, but rather, a desired state for sustain- ing the teaching hierarchy and a structured outcome of learning? In theorizing transference, Lacan (1991) argued that ignorance was not only a fundamental premise of analysis, but also of the subjective attach- ments between analyst and analysand and the emotions that they project on to each other (i.e., transference and counter-transference). Ignorance, as a passion, says Lacan in the epigraph above, is neglected, never said, never named as a “fundamental component” of the analysis relationship. Like- wise, argues Britzman (1998), the presumption of ignorance sets the stage for the transference of emotions that defines the relationship between the all-knowing teacher and the ignorant student. Ignorance becomes part of how teacher and student are constituted as subjects and of the emotional attachments—whether love or hate—that they project onto each other. While teaching and learning are ostensibly about knowledge, it is the © 2012 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto Curriculum Inquiry 42:4 (2012) Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2012.00607.x