The Wisdom of Humility as the Key to Education
And how to be humble
One of the pieces of advice I try to give my classes early each semester is that I can’t facilitate their growth in learning unless they choose to have a posture of humility. This might sound a bit arrogant of me, a bit “sage on the stage” as opposed to the “fellow traveler” model of teaching, but after nearly 20 years of teaching, it’s a conclusion I can’t avoid. Humility is a necessary sub-virtue to all true forms of learning. Aquinas puts humility under the virtue of temperance and that seems right to me since you are rightly moderating your perception of yourself, but as with all the virtues, there is a mixture of other virtues: justice and love especially. It is an injustice to God, your neighbor, and yourself to perceive yourself wrongly because it is not giving those individuals their due regard. But it is also unloving because when you love someone’s existence, you naturally respect them and show them honor. So I see humility as touching temperance, justice, and love, but mostly temperance.
When a student enters my class convinced that they have already mastered the content, they are condemning themselves to learn nothing. When a student enters convinced that they lack knowledge, they open themselves up to the possibility of wisdom. And this necessarily means being humble before teachers, professors, elders, pastors, the wisdom of the past, and the subject. This is true for all of us, not just students. For all of us, the path to knowledge comes through humility.
