St Augustine:

The Teacher

What does it mean 'to know' something?

If someone tells you something, do you know it?

Background

Augustine wrote the book The Teacher in about 389 AD. It is written in the form of a dialogue or conversation between himself and his 18-year-old son Adeodatus. Although it is probably too polished to be a record of an actual conversation, Augustine wrote in the confessions that it is an example of the types of dialogues that Augustine and his son had. Sadly, Adeodatus died soon after this.

Teaching is not just about telling people stuff

In The Teacher, St Augustine is attacking a particular view of what teaching is - the idea that it is just about telling people stuff, just about learning a collection of facts.

St Augustine isn’t very impressed with this concept of teaching:

‘…Who is so foolishly curious that he would send his son to school in order to learn what the teacher thinks?’

—St Augustine, The Teacher

Augustine is more interested in teaching as a way of turning someone away from worldly concerns and towards things that are sacred and holy.

He attacks this 'teaching is telling' model by arguing that it doesn’t make any sense and is in fact impossible. He begins by arguing that all teaching occurs through language and signs:

‘But all those disciplines that teachers claim to teach, even those of virtue and wisdom, they explain with words.’

—St Augustine, The Teacher

However, according to Augustine, this leads to a problem. He thinks that words are like signs - they point to things, so starts by thinking about what a sign is:

‘We generally call ‘signs’ all those things that signify something’.

—St Augustine, The Teacher

Imagine you saw a sign pointing to a McDonald's, but after following the sign, you realised there was no McDonald's there after all. Did the sign actually teach you anything?

In the same way, if someone tells you 'Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 411', that sentence only teaches you something if it is true. (Which it isn't - Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410.)

So it seems that if a sign or a sentence is going to teach you something, it has to be true!

The learner’s paradox

But this leads to a paradox:

Imagine that I am told, ‘Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410'. For this sentence to teach me something, then I must know that what it says is true - i.e. I must know that Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410. But if I already know that Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, then I don't learn anything when the teacher tells me!

Augustine describes this paradox like this:

‘When a sign is given to me it can teach me nothing if it finds me ignorant of the thing of which it is the sign—but if I’m not ignorant, what do I learn through the sign?’

—St Augustine, The Teacher

So... we have a problem. Obviously 'just being told' isn't enough to count as knowing something. There has to be something else. But what is it?

Plato came up with a very similar paradox a thousand years earlier:

Someone can’t learn about either what they know, nor about what they don’t know. If they know it, then there’s no need to search for it. And if they don’t know it, then they won’t know what they’re looking for!

—Plato, Meno

Traditionally, Plato’s solution to this problem is understood as being that we somehow remember or recollect things that we already knew before we were born - that we don’t really learn anything new at all. Augustine thought this was a silly solution because if Plato was right, everyone would have the same level of knowledge, but they don’t. Augustine thinks that there are genuine instances of learning - not just recollecting things we already know.

The inner light of truth

Augustine’s answer to the problem is that true learning is a matter of an inner episode of awareness that he calls illumination. I am sure that most of you will have felt a moment, probably in a maths class, or when doing a puzzle of some sort, when you suddenly understand the solution to something and go, ‘A-ha!’ This is the moment of illumination that Augustine is thinking about.

For Augustine, this is a sacred moment. He describes us being taught, not by the teacher, by the person standing at the front of the class, but by the inner light of truth. Augustine understood this inner light of truth was a manifestation of Jesus - the Word of God, the Logos. He quotes Jesus telling his disciples…

‘You are not to be called “teacher”, for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers.’

—The Gospel of Matthew

Tasks

Explain Augustine’s argument against the idea that 'teaching' is 'telling'.

You can use this frame to help you:

- I only learn what the teacher tells me, if ...
- But...
- And...
- Therefore, telling isn't enough for teaching. There must be something else
What is Augustine’s solution to this paradox? What extra ingredient does he think there is in learning?
Think of one objection to this solution.
Evaluate Augustine’s ideas about teaching.

Page updated

Report abuse