A Tale of Two Thomases

In Knowledge Worthily Received, we considered the paradox that Socrates considered himself “barren of wisdom”—yet was able to help bring forth knowledge in his students. We considered the temptation of “easy knowledge,” of the illusion of learning without struggle. We recalled St. Thomas’ claim that truth, properly speaking, is in the mind—with the peculiar result that it is not in books, diagrams, or spoken words. What is needed for any text or lecture to be true is an external active ingredient: wonder, curiosity, the demand: “why?”

There is no human learning without wonder. None. Like St. Thomas Aquinas,¹ I offer no qualifications or exceptions of any kind.

This is a very stark claim, and its application to teaching is immediately evident. It is not a useful bit of advice that students will learn better if they can be prodded to “productively struggle.” It is rather that there will be no knowledge whatsoever absent a questioning attitude.² And it is, therefore, a condition of children’s education that their curiosity be engaged. That is, granting one additional premise: that the classical view of the soul is correct. But there are alternative notions of education that take a stand on different convictions about the human soul.

Thomas Gradgrind

Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, had an equally stark view of education:

“Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.”³

While Thomas Aquinas stands in the tradition of Socrates, Thomas Gradgrind is Socrates’ antithesis. Previously, we asked how it was that Socrates could have been such a great teacher though he did not have the answers. Gradgrind, on the other hand, was full of facts. Whereas the purpose of Socrates’ questions was to incite curiosity and provoke perplexity, Gradgrind’s questions served to test attention and memory.

Socrates’ image in the Theaetetus was that of birth, the emergence of intellectual novelty in the soul. The students in Gradgrind’s classroom gave the impression of “little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.”⁴ Socrates’ students must discover the truth within themselves, while Gradgrind’s students receive the answers and store them.

What is the difference between those who embody the best of the classical tradition—Socrates, Origen, Thomas Aquinas—and, on the other hand, teachers like Thomas Gradgrind or theoreticians like B. F. Skinner or Gilbert Ryle? As a start, the former concern themselves with inner conditions (love, wonder, perplexity, insight), while the latter concern themselves with outer behavior (listening, observing, reciting, writing). Skinner in particular offers a very clear articulation and defense of the “Gradgrind paradigm.”

Teaching is a Dangerous Business

B. F. Skinner discussed Socrates’ model of teaching in a section entitled “The Teacher as Midwife.”⁵ He characterizes “the method of discovery,”⁶:

The teacher arranges the environment in which discovery is to take place, he suggests lines of inquiry, he keeps the student within bounds. The important thing is that he should tell him nothing.

Such a method, Skinner says, is harmful:

It is equally dangerous to forgo teaching important facts and principles in order to give the student a chance to discover them for himself.

Perhaps Socrates was corrupting the youth after all. Perhaps Stephen Tempier’s suspicions that St. Thomas Aquinas was a rather dangerous Dominican were correct. (The similarities between Thomas Gradgrind and Stephen Tempier are perhaps stronger than they might appear.)

Thomas Aquinas characterizes teaching as a process of questioning and hinting through signs that helps the student through the same learning process the teacher had to go through—and his teacher, and his teacher, all the way back to the original discovery.⁷ There is no skipping the process of discovery, no direct transmission of facts from mind to mind (or brain to brain) like electricity over the power grid. The problem is not one of transporting concepts but transforming people. There is only the path of discovery that may have been traversed before, with the teacher’s words and the textbook’s elaboration serving only as breadcrumbs (signs) to point the way one must travel oneself.

Who Understands Understanding?

What lies at the root of the two ways exemplified by Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Gradgrind is a different conception of understanding. Skinner gets at the core of the divergence when he says:

In a simple sense of the word, I have understood what a person says if I can repeat it correctly. In a somewhat more complex sense, I understand it if I respond appropriately.⁸

Gradgrind did not have the philosophical or psychological sophistication (such as it is) of B. F. Skinner, and it would be a mistake to suppose he was a behaviorist in the strict sense. But operative in both is an oversight of the human mind and heart⁹ and their ground in understanding.

How should we choose between the two ways of the two Thomases? Between a notion of learning as “repeating correctly” (just the Facts!) on the one hand, and a dangerous Dominican’s notion of wonder-driven discovery on the other?¹⁰

Perhaps St. Thomas’ view is appealing to you as an ideal or a poetic characterization, while you have the sneaking suspicion that Thomas Gradgrind’s approach is more practical, more realistic. How do we decide which of the two Thomases is right? The matter can be resolved by simple experiment, by an exercise.

An Exercise with Ratios

I choose ratios for our exercises because we take them to be simple, the sort of thing one learns in sixth grade. But there is an enormous gap between familiarity with a technique and understanding why it works. Fetch a pencil and scratch paper and work through the following problem:

Al, Bert, and Carl are the winners of a school drawing for a pile of Halloween candy, which they are to divide in a ratio of 3:2:1, respectively. Due to some confusion, they come at different times to claim their prizes, and each assumes he is the first to arrive. If each takes what he believes to be his correct share of candy, what fraction of the candy goes unclaimed?¹¹

If you can “repeat it correctly,” do you understand? Surely not. Nor can you simply calculate the answer, for the question is how to get the problem in a calculable form in the first place. The problem is not excessively difficult—I encountered it in an introduction to algebra—but it is not easy. The two key questions for you to answer are:

1. Can you solve this problem without experiencing the slightest puzzlement, some small curiosity or even frustration?
2. If I told you the answer, do you understand—even without any idea why that would be right? Or does your puzzlement aim not at a “correct answer” (you can find that here¹²) but at the idea that not only enables you to say what the answer is, but also why it is so?

How you answer determines which Thomas is right.

I submit that understanding is not possessed by the computer, the parrot, the drill sergeant, the one who knows how but not why. It is not shown by people who can apply steps they have been taught, but by those who have the Idea and so can come up with the steps as needed for any relevant problem within a domain. It is attained not by listening and repetition (though these are useful), but by curiosity, puzzling, and then a eureka moment. The answer dwells in just that place B. F. Skinner was most contemptuous of: the “minds and hearts of men and women.”¹³ And the hearts and minds of children—for they too are human.

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1. “… nothing can be known without the agent intellect,” Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 1, a. 1, ad 3. See also Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 3.↩︎
2. A questioning attitude may exist as a diminished form of curiosity, as when one is concerned simply with what is needed to pass a test. Then, I suppose some learning can occur, but it is oriented to and limited by its aim: getting a passing grade. And one may learn how to do that, without ever really learning Greek or algebra.↩︎
3. Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book I, ch. 1.↩︎
4. Dickens, Hard Times, Book I, ch. 1.↩︎
5. B. F. Skinner, The Technology of Teaching (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), 259.↩︎
6. Here the direct reference is to Newman’s The Idea of a University.↩︎
7. See Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 11, a. 1.↩︎
8. B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (New York: Knopf, 1974), 156.↩︎
9. We choose the wrong path at the very start when we suppose that our goal is to change the “minds and hearts of men and women” rather than the world in which they live. B. F. Skinner, “Why I Am Not a Cognitive Psychologist,” Behaviorism 5, no. 2 (Fall 1977): 1–10, 9.↩︎
10. See What do Philosophers Know?, the section “Objections and Replies,” for one philosophical answer to this question.↩︎
11. The Art of Problem Solving: Introduction to Algebra, p. 186. Original source: AMC 12.↩︎
12. 5/18↩︎
13. Skinner, “Why I Am Not a Cognitive Psychologist,” 9.↩︎