Can education truly liberate when its traditional emancipatory approaches depend on the very inequality they claim to overcome? This chapter examines the fundamental paradox within critical pedagogy: how can education free students from ideological blindness without positioning teachers as enlightened saviours and students as helpless victims? Biesta’s analysis reveals how traditional emancipation operates through a logic of dependency, where the emancipator’s authority depends on the emancipated’s presumed inferiority. Through engagement with Jacques Rancière’s radical pedagogy, the chapter explores an alternative approach that begins with the assumption of equal intelligence rather than treating equality as education’s distant goal. This shift transforms the teacher’s role from explainer to one who summons students to verify their own intellectual equality. To examine this, the chapter follows Biesta as he distinguishes between two temporal frameworks: linear time that positions students as ‘not-yet’ beings requiring future completion, and the non-time of subjectification where subject-ness arrives as a disruptive event. Championing the latter as the time of subjectification, the chapter explains how Biesta suggests such a non-time requires us to think about teaching as dissensus rather than as concurrence, asking the impossible from students rather than facilitating predictable progress. In this situation, trust emerges as education’s fundamental condition, creating a space where students encounter their freedom and must decide what to do with it.