Rancière and intelligence

I've been reading and rereading a little Rancière in preperation for my graduate class. It's not my kind of thing: it's too tinged with Maoism for me. (Against Rancière's will no doubt, it effectively forms a bridge between Maoism a la 1968 and cultural populism.)  And much of it is written in a heavy-handed, pompous, unnecessarily obfuscating, academic prose which often makes too much of itself. But nonetheless, in its broad contours, it seems like a way of thinking well worth taking account of.
For instance.
For Rancière (and for Jacotot the 19thc outsider educational theorist he is writing about in The Ignorant Schoolmaster),  the relation between the teacher and the student is structured around the distance which separates them. The teacher aims to make the student know as much as she does. But this pedagogical relation becomes interminable.  The teacher continues to distance herself from her pupil, continues to mark him off as an ignoramus,  in order to keep on teaching him.  What such a 'democratic' and 'arithmetical' concept of pedagogy fails to admit is precisely the equality of intelligence. This does not mean that we all have equal amounts of knowledge but that thinking and learning (i.e. intelligence) involves the same techniques for all of us. A scientist in his lab and a barely literate peasant are both involved in "translation", that is in comparing what they know with what they don't know, and verifying the latter by reference to the former.
In other words: we are intelligent, and equally intelligent, not by virtue of what we know but in relation to what we don't know.
Rancière's more recent work on the aesthetic has a different perspective. It turns around the claim that modern aesthetic is built around two contradictory models and aims. First, that art is autonomous and distanced from the lived-in world (and is to be viewed disinterestedly from afar). Second, that art presents a promise for a better, more perfected way of living in the world (i.e. is to be imitated or repeated). 
This aesthetic contradiction (between distance and union) is a version of the pedagogical contradiction as Rancière remarks at the beginning of The Emancipated Spectator: the teacher wants the pupil to know what she knows and be what she is aims for union between teaching and taught; the teacher can only teach by positing the pupil as an ignoramus who does not even know what he does not know requires distance between them.
The problem with Rancière's account is that he seems to take a process for a structure. Both aestheticised art and modern democratic education presuppose that the spectator and the student (and the artist and the teacher) are becoming: the school and the gallery are supposed continually to change things.