Microsoft Word - IGWEBUIKE JOURNAL VOL.1 NO. 1 IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 47 THE RELEVANCE OF ST AUGUSTINE’S TEACHING THEORIES IN TWENTY FIRST CENTURY By Bartholomew Chidili, O.S.A, PhD. Kaduna State University, Kaduna udachidili@yahoo.com Abstract This paper explored the fulcrum of Augustine’s teaching value and discovered its absolute importance even in this twenty first century. As a theologian and a philosopher of unrivaled prowess, Augustine presented many indisputable theories for acquisition of valuable education. His love-teaching theory is very compelling. The link up of normal learning to the divine love is most revealing. It demonstrates that teaching is not just a mere job but a vocation which one must embrace with every enthusiasm. Centralizing learning on the learner is a compelling theory which still makes waves among current education philosophers. Doubt as a positive process of learning is also forceful as it is currently trending in many sectors of educational endeavors. The language exploration for learners is undoubtedly necessary for facilitation of learning process. Lucidity can never be faulted in teaching and learning process. Hence it makes bold to conclude that Augustine is actually an indisputable doyen of teaching—and learning process. Keywords: Relevance, Augustine, Teaching, Theories, Twenty first century Introduction Aurelius Augustine was bishop of Hippo, in North Africa, and his writings established the intellectual foundations of Christianity in the West. He was born in A.D. 354 at Thagaste, a town forty-five miles south of Hippo in the Roman province of Numidia, which is now Algeria. His father, Patricius, was an unregenerate traditionalist both in faith and morals until his later years when he was somewhat uncertainly won over by the persistence of his wife. He held the office of decurio of Tagaste under the Roman administration, a title given to members of the senate of the municipalities and colonies. He also appears to have been a landowner in a small way; (Letter 126, 7), if this is true, then in spite of his name he may have been a native of Numidia, the settlement of Roman veterans in North Africa captured two centuries earlier (Leonard,2013:1). From the pages of the Confessions of his son he stands out as endowed with a rough kindliness of character accompanied by a tendency to violent outbursts of anger. His mother, Monica was a devoted Christian whose moral force character and IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 48 Christian example were dynamic influences in his life. It is probable that she herself was of Libyan extraction, her name being derived from the Libyan deity, Mon, who was worshipped in the nearby town of Thibilis. She emerges in St Augustine’s Confession as one who, like her son, had reached the serenity of faith only after a long course of spiritual travail (Leonard,2013:1). Compensating for the neglect of the father, she showed great concern for the spiritual instruction of her son: ‘My tender young heart,’ says Augustine, ‘had drunk in the name of Christ even with my mother’s milk and held it deeply within me (Confession iii, 4, 8) In his late teens he went to Carthage for further studies, and through his reading of Cicero, he became enthused about philosophy. He became a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage and later in Rome and Milan. Augustine was a restless seeker rather than a systematic thinker, and after a brief romance with the dualistic philosophy of Manichaeanism, he immersed himself in the Neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus. His whole life may be characterized as an intellectual and moral struggle with the problem of evil, a struggle that he worked out through synthesizing the ideas of the Neoplatonists with Christianity. He upheld the teachings of the Bible, but he realized that maintaining them in the intellectual and political climate of his age required a broad liberal education (Leonard, 2013:1). In his struggle against evil, Augustine believed in a hierarchy of being in which God was the Supreme Being on whom all other beings, that is, all other links in the great chain of being, were totally dependent. All beings were good because they tended back toward their creator who had made them from nothing. Humans, however, possess free will, and can only tend back to God by an act of the will. Human refusal to turn to God is in this way of thinking, nonbeing, or evil, so although the whole of creation is good, evil comes into the world through human rejection of the good, the true, and the beautiful, that is, God. The ultimate purpose of education, then, is turning toward God, and Augustine thought the way to God was to look into oneself. It is here one finds an essential distinction Augustine makes between knowing about something (cogitare), and understanding (scire). One can know about oneself, but it is through understanding the mystery of oneself that one can come to understand the mystery of God. Thus the restless pursuit of God is always a pursuit of a goal that recedes from the seeker. As humans are mysteries to themselves, God is understood as wholly mysterious (Leonard, 2013:1). Augustine’s Credentials as a Teacher Augustine’s own experience of teaching was considerable. Up to the year of his conversion he practiced teaching as a profession. At Tagaste he taught grammar IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 49 for a year in a school, which he himself established. Later he taught in schools of rhetoric at Carthage and Rome. The reputation he acquired as a teacher of rhetoric speedily led to his appointment as a public orator and teacher of rhetoric at Milan. On his conversion to Christianity he laid down his secular teaching duties, but did not abandon the vocation of teaching. He clearly states in the Confessions that he was merely putting aside the work of formal instruction in the techniques of oratory in favor of a more challenging and significant teaching task (Confessions, ix, 4-5). In the months immediately following his conversion, this task was begun at a country house at Cassiciacum, near Milan, where Augustine spent some months discussing with a group of his friends and young pupils the implications of Christian involvement. On his return to North Africa and his native Tagaste Augustine realized the need for the spread of education among Christians, both priests and laymen. Thus at Tagaste and later at Hippo he established communities, whose purpose was the preparation of well- educated Christian teachers for the North African church (Supra: 23-4). In reply to his friend Nebridius, Augustine shows his strong feeling of responsibility towards his students at Tagaste: “Shall I come to you? But there are some people who cannot come with me, and I am sure that it would be wrong to desert them. You can live agreeably with your own thoughts; but this is the condition at which they are still aiming” (Letter 10, 1). The Teacher-Pupil Relationship All recommendations Augustine makes about teacher—learner relationship derives from the love commandment which he sees as the foundation for all personal relationships: “thou shall love the Lord thy God and thy neighbor as thyself” (Mk.12:33). His reason being that it is the same love, by which God has created humans and instructs them, is the source of the human desire to learn. It is the teacher’s duty to inspire this love in his/her pupils. Thus, for Augustine, to be a teacher is an act of love. Hence, he advised the teachers to "Imitate the good, bear with the evil, love all" (Christopher, 1952: 87). This is why the personal relationship with God which enables humanity to advance in understanding and so live the good life, must be reflected in the association of teacher and learners, since this association is designed to effect exactly the same purpose. Thus, in instructing the pupils the teacher must cooperate with the purposes and methods of God. This means that teaching must be deeply grounded in a personal relationship rendered productive by love (Howie, 1969: 150). IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 50 When love is the foundation of teaching the familiar takes on the quality of novelty, and the teaching is raised from a pedestrian to an inspirational level leading to the thrills of exploration and discovery. Teaching in its inspirational level engenders productive sense which implies a common involvement of teacher and learner in tasks of mutual interest. If this mutual concern is absent, there remains only the boredom of ‘repeating over and over again things, which are already thoroughly well known to the teacher and appropriate only for little children (The Instruction of the Uninstructed, 17). The following passage from The Instructing the Uninstructed, sensitively expresses the experience of intercommunication, in Augustine’s thought. Let us then adapt ourselves to our pupils with a love which is at once the love of a brother, of a father and of a mother. When once we are linked to them in heart, the old familiar things will seem new to us. So great is the influence of a sympathetic mind that, when our pupils are affected by us as we speak and we by them as they learn, we dwell in each other and thus both they, as it were, speak within us what they hear, while we after a fashion learn in them what we teach (The Instructing the Uninstructed 17). Moreover, Augustine insists that, if love is to be effective in promoting learning, it must be specifically directed (Supra: 54-55). This implies that the teacher must be observant of individual needs and reactions and vary his/her teaching methods accordingly. The teacher’s love must necessarily be expressed in different modes to accommodate varying degrees of maturity, cultural extraction and personal characteristics of the various persons constituting class (Howie, 1969: 152). In the words of Dewey (1944:89), “an education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his/her own part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be maintained.” The essence of this is to whet the appetite of the learners and to enable them study enthusiastically whatever they find suitable. This improves and enhances knowledge and indeed adds value to education of individual. Learner Centered Method of Education Augustine’s basic philosophical and psychological assumptions assign to the teacher a peripheral position in the process of learning. It is the learner himself who is central; he/she places him/herself in a direct encounter with the thing to be known. Augustine, in his educational theory proposes that the teacher’s duty IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 51 is to encourage pupils to acquire education with all his skill. He maintains that the learner must be allowed to discover ideas by him/herself. Teacher’s job is to influence the learner with his/her examples, enthusiasm and love. In this way, Augustine insists, the pupil will excel. The pupil must neither be restricted nor compelled to learn. In his words, since intellectual enquiry, i.e. education is an absolutely good thing to do; there should be no restriction on the range of such enquiry: for ‘nothing is lost which we enquire into with serious purpose’ (On Music vi, 23). In the later century, in 1762 to be exact, Rousseau published his Emile and while not mentioning Augustine by name repeated him almost verbatim. For Rousseau insists that his Emile should be given the freedom to discover things by himself. Since, “man will never have what befits a man except under its own condition” (Rousseau, 2000:169). This freedom to learn gives rise to one learning according to one’s aptitudes. Thus it is good to allow the child to develop on its own and then cash in on his/her interest. This will lead the child to develop a certain interest or career of his/her delight. This improves on the traditional educational wisdom Rousseau says, “consists in control, constraint and compulsion” (Rousseau, 2000:11). The said freedom liberates one from the life of ‘imprisonment’ the traditional institutions engender in Rousseau’s opinion. Thus when a child is free it develops all its faculties before making a choice of what to do with its life. This freedom is also one of the prime techniques of counseling strategy. The counselor always gives the counselee freedom to discover things for him/herself while guiding him/her by gentle suggestions. Pastoral counselor for instance, gently guides his/her client to faith maturity by presenting realities of faith while the client takes the final decision. Augustine’s as well as Rousseau’s vision makes a case in the areas of teaching and learning. Their vision as stated earlier is child centered and progressive. This means that the child should be given the chance to discover things by him/herself while the teacher patiently guides him/her. This is in total distinction with the traditional assumption that teaching takes place when the teacher passes on his accumulated knowledge to the students—a process Freire (1970:71) defines as banking education. This is an education where students are taken as the banks where teachers deposit accumulated knowledge. This type of education reinforces a lack of critical thinking and knowledge ownership in students, which in turn reinforces oppression. Reflecting on this, Newsam (2012) maintains that “the traditional position starts from the assumption, taken to be so obvious as not to be open to question, that the purpose of teaching is to ensure that those taught acquire a prescribed body of IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 52 knowledge and set of values.” But in Augustine’s classroom and indeed that of Rousseau’s, the teacher’s job is little guidance without the child even knowing it (Augustine, on Music vi, 23; Rousseau, 2000:160). The teacher has ‘to give him a taste for and methods of’ learning various sciences ‘when this taste is more mature’ (Rousseau, 2000:161). The teacher’s answer to the pupil’s question should only be ‘to whet its curiosity but not enough to satisfy it.’ While the pupil has to learn the prolongation of his/her attention this period, the teacher has to be careful not to reach the “point of tedium”, rather, he/she must see that the pupil learns according to his/her desire and capacity and never against his/her will (Rousseau, 2000:161). Furthermore, this view of the teacher as not being the cause of learning but as merely supplying the stimulus and perhaps the source materials marks one of the differences between the Platonic and Aristotelian systems. To the Aristotelian St Thomas Aquinas the teacher is the cause of learning in as real a sense as the doctor is the cause of good health in his patient. The Augustinian point of view, on the other hand, is one which has never lacked its supporters. In the twentieth century, for example, Adamson (1921:27), writing in the Individual and the Environment, says: In the educative process itself there does not seem to be any room for the teacher—the whole business is between the individual and his worlds and the teacher is outside it or external to it. Augustine himself argues this point most thoroughly in The Teacher where he maintains that teaching and learning are not set apart as two separate and distinct activities. When these distinctions are made, the activity is often thought to be centered on the teacher and the learner comes to be seen as playing a subordinate and even passive role. In Augustine’s view, on the other hand, the activities of teaching and learning come to be closely fused together and lose their distinguishing marks. The learner teaches himself, whether or not he is assisted by an external teacher. The activity of learning arises entirely of the learner’s own volition in response to the presentation of some desired objective, and it continues so long as that objective proves attractive. Nothing which the teacher can do can produce learning, unless the learner voluntarily engages himself. This is applied today in adult education and Open University learning strategy. However, by this suggestion, St. Augustine points to the difference between a method which involves the learner in an activity of thought and one which does IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 53 not necessarily do so. From his own experience of learning in school he understood the difference between the development of ideas and their rote memorizing of words. On the one hand, there is the purposeful, exciting quest for knowledge; on the other hand the largely meaningless ‘sing-song’ of the schools. Augustine’s own most significant learning was not gained from schoolmasters, but through the self-activity of thought. His real teachers were those who not merely talked to him through books (e.g. Aristotle, Cicero, Plato), but who also encouraged him to think critically about what they said. He makes it clear in the Confessions that he used the material gathered from these teachers as resource materials for the furtherance of his own intellectual quest; he accepted only what he discovered and verified by his own personal effort (Howie, 1969:158-159). St. Augustine’s teaching method is what is now called the method of ‘activity,’ otherwise known as the ‘direct’ method, since it insists that the learner be directly engaged with the thing to be known. In his own teaching Augustine consistently demonstrates the method. In The Instruction of the Uninstructed, for example, he concludes his discussion of the principles of good teaching with the remark that the influence of examples of good teaching is greater than verbal expositions of theory: You would learn better by watching us and listening to us when actually engaged in the work itself than by reading what we write (The Inst. 23). Learning by observation Augustine pursues the theme of learner-centered education in a later chapter, where he remarks that in childhood he learned his own language in a pleasant manner ‘by mere observation amid the caresses of my nurses, the jokes of smiling friends and the delights of those who played with me.’ Amid such informal activity he learned ‘to give birth to ideas.’ He emphasizes that the words, which he learned without clearly realizing that he was learning at all, were learned ‘not from teachers but from people talking’ (Confessions, I, 14, 23). Motivational Learning theory One of the educational theories of Augustine is motivation. Augustine argues that the teacher’s success in the classroom is a scintillating motivation. By this, Augustine means that the teacher must motivate his pupils through clear behaviors that spell out evidently the love of the subject he/she professes and the love of the students. Anything short of this, places the learners in a very bad IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 54 mood which results in loss of interest and utter dislike for the subject and indeed the teacher. Hence the teachers are advised to do whatever it takes to love their subjects and the learners so as to facilitate the learning of the task at hand (Howei, 1969:145). Doubt as a Positive Learning Process In company with Descartes, Augustine regards the condition of doubt in positive terms as implying a desire to learn, i.e. a state of readiness for learning (Supra:130-134). In his The Trinity, Augustine applies this optimistic belief to the practice of teaching. The statement, ‘I do not know’ (nescio), spoken by a student to a teacher, or spoken internally by the student to himself, signifies, ‘I have as yet only a partial knowledge and I desire to know more fully.’ This may well be a more promising beginning for learning than the apparently more positive ‘I know’ (scio), which may indicate nothing more than a complacent acceptance of untested and invalid assumptions…Augustine is drawing upon his teaching experience and learning, when he shows that a feeling of proper humility in the face of knowledge is a better beginning than the conviction that there is nothing further to be known. A man may be deceiving himself when he says ‘I know this,’ but this is less likely when he says, ‘I do not know it’ (Howie, 1969: 148). The man who says, ‘I know,’ and is speaking the truth, does not necessarily know what knowing means. But the man who says, ‘I do not know,’ and is faithfully saying what he believes and knows that he is speaking the truth—that man at least knows what knowing is. This is because he is distinguishing the person who does not know when he accurately surveys himself and says, ‘I do not know.’ When he knows that this is true, how could he get this knowledge if he did not know what knowing is? (The Trinity x, 3). It is in The Soliloquies that he first examines the actual insidious doubt as to the existence of the conscious, thinking self. He confidently argues that the soul ‘knows itself by a sort of inward presence, real and not imaginary’ (The Trinity, x, 16). If man’s thought is not confused and perverted by the quibbling of the professional skeptics, he enjoys an immediate certainty that he exists, that he lives and that he has an intellect. It is in fact by virtue of his possession and use of his intellect that he is assured of the certainty of his own existence. He knows that he thinks and from this he properly concludes that he exists (Howie, 1969: 131). The argument from the reality of thought to the existence of the thinking self recalls Descartes’ ‘I think; therefore I exist’ (cogito ergo sum) the central position in Augustine’s thought, which it does in Descartes,’ nevertheless IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 55 Augustine regards it as very important. Both in the Soliloquies and again in The Free Will he takes the reality of self-consciousness as the starting point in any attempt to establish other conclusions. Thus the second book of the Soliloquies centers on the attempt to demonstrate human immortal nature. The argument is preceded by a series of questions designed to determine what can be taken for granted as basis for further progress. The last exchange of question and answer is as follows: Reason: Do you know that you think? Augustine: I do. Reason: Then it is true that you think? Augustine: it is true. (The Free Will ii, 7). Augustine’s argument is designed to emphasize the positive function of doubt as the starting point of all learning; doubt is in fact the evidence of the ability to grow in understanding, and not the symptom of a fatal inability to learn. Man’s habit of doubting is the proper consequence of his possession of a rational mind; to be doubting is to be thinking. Augustine accepts doubt as the guarantee of man’s ability to learn and indeed as a clear indication that he is positively using his power of thought to that end (Howie, 1969: 132-133). Starting Point for a Good Teaching and Learning Process While in the classroom or any place for teaching, Augustine argues that the teacher must choose the subject of interest to the students. Because according to him, a desired theme of thought will enable the learners to learn the object of learning and make it their own; otherwise the teaching may take place but the learning will not occur. He also suggests that teachers should always start teaching by asking the pupils what they know already about the chosen topic of learning. The value of this, says Augustine, is that learners acquire knowledge better and faster if they can begin from what is partially in their purview of knowledge. For, “if a person desires to possess something, it is because he already believes that it really exists. But one cannot believe in the reality of something entirely outside the range of one’s existing experience and knowledge. In other words, there can be no impulse to learn anything which is not already known in part: Unless we have some slight knowledge of a subject in our minds, we cannot be kindled with any enthusiasm to learn it” (The Trinity x, 1). Therefore, the teacher must begin with what the student already knows and give him a glimpse of what there is still to be known, and when this is done, the learner is said to ‘fashion in his mind an imaginary form, by which he is fired IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 56 with love.’ This form in the imagination is composed of the materials of his existing experience. ‘How does the learner form this image,’ Augustine asks, ‘unless he draws upon the things he/she already knows?’ (The Trinity, x, 4). Illustrating from his rhetoric class, Augustine averred in his The Trinity that: The more a thing is known and yet not fully known, the more the mind desires to know what remains to be known about it. If all a man knew was that a word was a spoken sound and did not know that it was the sign of something, he would seek nothing further—but because he knows it to be not only a spoken sound but also a sign, he wishes to understand it fully, and no sign is fully known unless we know what it is a sign of’ (The Trinity x, 2). The Importance of Adapting the Teaching Content to the Level of the Learners Among the cardinal teachings of Augustine, is that teachers should adapt their teaching to their students according to the level of their understanding. This is consistent with African traditional education counseling where all the contents of community expectation are spread along the growth lines of a child (Chidili, 1993, 18-20). This counseling further agrees with the findings of developmental psychologists like Piaget, Erikson, Kohlberg and others. Piaget, for instance centers his child’s moral developmental perceptive on early beginning; insisting that the development must of necessity begin through the child’s interaction with the environment. This concept assumes the fact that development does not take place through the mere maturing of individuals; or through the ideas and principles imposed from the significant others. Rather, it upholds the double process of assimilation and accommodation. This means that individuals assimilate the outside environmental experience while the development is taking place: because of their own innate potentiality, which enables them to make their own impression upon the environment while assimilating it. This indicates the individuating power that enables the individual to act freely on any encountered experience. Kohlberg essentially agrees with Piaget in this area of fundamental process of learning. He believes that all learning takes place through the interaction of individuals with their environment. He accepts Piaget’s principle that the center of learning is the active child who structures his or her perceived environment. Furthermore, Kohlberg accepts Piaget’s postulation of different stages of development in moral development and thinking. These stages of development characterize the contact between the child’s structuring tendencies and the structural features of the environment (Elias, pp. 66-67; Balk, 183-187). According to Kohlberg, “most children under the age of 9 operate at the IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 57 preconventional level of moral reasoning.” This means that at the preconventional level individuals are meant to understand morality as meaning either to obey authority and avoid punishment or to serve one’s own interests. For instance Kohlberg cited an example of a seven-year-old Robin who was asked to explain why a person should tell the truth, she readily answered saying, “You will be spanked if you lie.” Kohlberg (1976) also noted that this level of moral reasoning is applicable to some adolescents as well as many criminal offenders. Individuals at preconventional also perceive rules and social expectations to be imposed by significant others, which means that they are not authors of their behaviors. Moreover, Kohlberg (1976) contends that conventional moral thinking is the level at which most adolescents and adults function. This is to say that in this level most adolescents and adults obey and uphold societal rules and expectations. Within the level of preconventional period, individuals obey the societal rules only when it is in their own interest but put the interest of the society into consideration when they reach conventional level as observed earlier. It is then at postconventional level that individuals distinguish “their identities from the rules of society and work from self-chosen principles that are grounded in the concept of justice” (Balk, 1995, p. 187). The essence of this is to enable the teachers to key to this psychological age so as to map out the learners according to their age-level of understanding and then plan lessons to suit each group. Within this period Augustine encourages the teachers to be simple, clear, direct, and patient as they impart the knowledge. He emphasizes that this period of teaching requires much repetition, and could induce boredom in the teacher, but then he counseled that this boredom would be overcome by sympathizing with the students according to which, "they, as it were, speak in us what they hear, while we, after a fashion, learn in them what we teach" (Christopher, 1952: 41). This kind of sympathy induces joy in the teacher and joy in the student, in the final analysis. Furthermore, Augustine maintains that all kinds of teaching are to be done in the restrained style. According to him, the restrained teaching style requires the teacher not to overload the student with too much material, but to stay on one theme at a time, to reveal to the student what is hidden from him, to solve difficulties, and to anticipate other questions that might arise. He encouraged the teachers to speak in the mixed style from time to time i.e. using elaborate yet well-balanced phrases and rhythms–for the purpose of delighting their students IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 58 and attracting them to the beauty of the material. He argues further that teachers should also be able to speak in the grand style, which aims at moving students to action. He then explains that what makes the grand style unique is not its verbal elaborations, but the fact that it comes from the heart, from emotion and passion– thus moving students not only to grab topic properly but also to obey God as they use his creation to arrive at full enjoyment of God. This hoped-for response is wholly consistent with what is probably the most famous quotation from Augustine's autobiography, The Confessions: “You have made us for yourself O Lord and our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you” (Bk. 1, Chap. 1:39). The Importance of Lucidity and Language Some of the most interesting practical advices Augustine gives to the teacher is concerned with the use of language to communicate thought and the lucidity of the language. Augustine’s emphasis on lucidity as one of the first virtues and duties of the teacher is very essential. Augustine advises that the teacher must of necessity value lucidity more highly than verbal ornament or pedantic purity of speech. In view of that, Augustine distinguishes between the professional rhetorician and the teacher. Accordingly, for the former, eloquence consists in making people do what the speaker wants them to do. But the ‘true eloquence’ of the teacher on the other hand consists in ‘making clear what was obscure’ (Christian Education ii, iv, 26). He also considered language to be as much a hindrance as a help to learning. Augustine explains that since the mind moves faster than the words the teacher utters, and the words do not adequately express what the teacher intends, the teacher must be careful in uttering words while teaching so as to convey intelligible knowledge to the learners. The teacher must also understand that the student hears the words in their own ways, and attend not only to the words, but also to the teacher's tone of voice and other nonverbal signs; which often times leads to the students’ unintentional misunderstanding of the meaning the teacher might be conveying. This is why the teacher is bound to welcome the students' questions even when they interrupt his/her speech. The teacher must listen to students and converse with them, and question them on their motives as well as their understanding. It is under this purview that Augustine understands education as a process of posing problems and seeking answers through conversation (Howie, 1969: 153-155). Problem-posing is a tool for developing and strengthening critical thinking skills. It is an inductive questioning process that structures dialogue in the classroom. Obviously, problem-posing dialogue is rooted in the works of Augustine and IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities. Vol. 1 No 1, June 2015. ISSN 2488-9210(Online) ISSN 2504 – 9038(Print) (A Publication of the Augustinian Institute in collaboration with AATREPSCHOLARS) 59 continued in the works of Dewey and Piaget who were strong advocates for active, inquiring, hands-on education that resulted in student-centered curricula (Shor, 1992:36). Freire (1970:68) expanded on the idea of active, participatory education through problem-posing dialogue, a method that transforms the students into "critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher.” Learners bring to adult education programs a wealth of knowledge from their personal experiences, and the problem-posing method builds on these shared experiences. By introducing specific questions, the teacher encourages the students to make their own conclusions about the values and pressures of society. Freire (1970:68) refers to this as an "emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.” Conclusion The foregoing has explored the fulcrum of Augustine’s teaching value and discovered its absolute importance even in this twenty first century. As a theologian and a philosopher of unrivaled prowess, Augustine presented many indisputable theories for acquisition of valuable education. His love-teaching theory is very compelling. The link up of normal learning to the divine love is most revealing. It demonstrates that teaching is not just a mere job but a vocation which one must embrace with every enthusiasm. Centralizing learning on the learner is a compelling theory which still makes waves among current education philosophers. Doubt as a positive process of learning is also forceful as it is currently trending in many sectors of educational endeavors. The language exploration for learners is undoubtedly necessary for facilitation of learning process. Lucidity can never be faulted in teaching and learning process. Hence we make bold to conclude that Augustine is actually an indisputable doyen of teaching—and learning process. References Adamson, J. E.( 1921). The Individual and his Environment. London: Longmans Green. Chidili, B. (1993). Discovering Christianity in African Cultures. Nairobi, Kenya: PANN Printers. Christopher, J. P. (1952). Augustine: The First Catechetical Instruction (400). 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