The Philosophy of Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

The Philosophy of Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas
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Author: Format: Manufacturer:	Mary Helen Mayer, M.A. Hard Cover Roman Catholic Books

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How to teach—and learn—like the clearest teacher in history: St.Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas is Catholicism’s greatest teacher. His crowning achievement, the Summa Theologiae, was written as an introductory text for his students. But how many realize that his genius for teaching went hand in hand with his technique for learning from his own great teachers, St. Albertus Magnus and Aristotle? That connection becomes clear in this inspiring guidebook, as useful to students (formal or armchair readers) as it is to teachers and homeschooling parents. Highlights:

Aquinas’s rules for memory training

How teachers and textbooks are merely aids to self-development

How this growth and development applies not only to knowledge, but to character

Key characteristics of “ideal teacher” and of “ideal pupil”

The four requirements of a good teacher

How St. Thomas anticipates by centuries the best insights of modern educators—but acts as a corrective to their most harmful errors

“All learning comes from previous knowledge”

Two key characteristics of the best teachers

The relation of truth to character

The meaning of character as an “acquired self”

Why the ability to acquire and retain habits is central to forming character—and to education

How the formation of habits depends on the ability to conceive an ideal

Importance of great virtue on the formation of ideals

The four stages of character formation and growth

The four principles of learning as “self-activity”—and the role of a teacher

How all learning begins with a problem which the student must solve with the guidance of the teacher

Why experience is necessary for learning—and how the teacher helps the student organize his experience

Bad news for some “education majors”: Why the teacher must not follow contemporary fad educational theories

How the teacher must protect students from “the disintegrating effects of error”

How the mind knows a thing not only by what it is but by what it does

The medieval method of the disputando—how to use it, and why it is far superior to the modern “lecture” method of teaching

Why it’s wrong to abuse or manipulate words and other symbols

How man’s “constructive imagination” enables him to be different from any other creature

How this imaginative power is under the control of the will

How good teaching stimulates “reflective thinking”

God Himself as the model and pattern for teachers

How God, as man's Head Teacher, arranged the universe so that man would sense problems—and so that the universe itself would suggest solutions

How God made it easy for man to sort error and truth

The significance of “symbols”—chiefly, words—in education—and why the failure to understand this is one of the chief failings of modern education

How public education is taking on the nature of animal training

The teacher as mediator between child and curriculum

The importance of logic: exactly how—and why— teachers must present material

Reviewing learned material—why it's crucial

How Thomas’s view of teaching and learning relates to his complete philosophy of life

The core of this volume is the complete text of St. Thomas' treatise on education, De Magistro (On the Teacher), presented here for the first time in English. An introduction and extensive commentary draw out its profound lessons for modern teachers and students. Here you will discover St. Thomas's most penetrating insights about education—and about why there can be no teaching without learning. The timeless principles of education laid out here are also a much-needed corrective to the destructive “fad” theories that dominate educational thinking today.

“A valuable contribution to educational theory… will no doubt come as a surprise to many readers not familiar with medieval literature or the philosophy of the Schools. It discloses the fact that problems, commonly supposed to be of purely contemporary origin, were studied carefully centuries ago. The notion of education as growth, the function of symbols, the nature of reflection, the principle of self-activity, the value of experience, the conception of educational processes as selfdevelopment— all these are ancient, not modern, discoveries.” —Catholic World (1929)

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