Aquinas's Views on Teaching

Abstract

As a teacher and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas sets out to investigate the nature of pedagogical activity in his treatise, On the Teacher in Articles 1-4, Question 11 of the Disputed Questions on Truth. His analysis of teaching and of the teacher’s role are informed, as one might expect, by his epistemological views and theological beliefs. One of the first issues that Aquinas has to confront is a theological one, namely, whether or not one can describe any human being as a teacher if one believes that God is the pre-eminent teacher as the primary source of all knowledge. While the latter proposition may seem rather problematic to contemporary Western thought, it was an acceptable issue for discussion in Aquinas’s time and is formulated by him in various ways in a number of the objections cited at the beginning of Article 1. Many of these appear to originate from the Augustinian tradition, together with some others from scriptural sources, and all of them argue along the lines that the Christian belief in God’s noetic power is difficult to reconcile with our human capacity to function freely as independent cognitive beings. In terms of pedagogy, this becomes a debate about the very existence of an authentic human pedagogy if God is believed to be teacher par excellence. Aquinas decides to deal with this problem at the outset.