Reading Carefully Augustine’s De Magistro

There are surely few writers who have had a more profound impact on European culture, and in the broadest range of fields, than St. Augustine, and this despite the fact that he was North African. Nonetheless, while Augustine is still called upon in debates on interfaith dialogue and in theological and philosophical disputes, one area of his large corpus has received scant attention—his philosophy of education. Although there are references throughout Augustine's writings to his philosophy of education, he devotes only a single text to its elaboration—De Magistro—On the Teacher. The fact that this work has been largely overlooked by scholars is disappointing, because the De Magistro, despite its use of theological language, retains a very modern and contemporary thematic with interesting insights for any contemporary theory of education. In this article we provide a primer in reading Augustine's De Magistro.