This paper compares the worldviews of Thomas Aquinas and Desiderius Erasmus across two key topics: free will and the purpose of education. Aquinas, shaped by scholastic tradition, grounded both concepts in divine truth, arguing that free will is a God-given quality and that education ultimately orients humanity toward God. Erasmus, formed by Renaissance humanism, adopted a middle position on free will between Luther and the Church, and envisioned education as cultivating culturally and ethically minded individuals. The paper also includes brief response reflections on the developmental needs of learners and the role of personal worldview in shaping educational philosophy.
Erasmus's worldview was more humanist than that of Aquinas, who was more scholastic in his approach to philosophy and theology. Each had been formed by different environments: Aquinas came to maturity during a highly scholastic age, while Erasmus came to maturity during the height of the Renaissance, when humanism and the first stirrings of Protestantism were coming to the fore. While both were committed Roman Catholics, their worldviews led them to adopt somewhat different positions on topics such as education and the nature of free will.
On the question of free will, both Erasmus and Aquinas agreed that man possessed it, as ordained by God. Erasmus, however, was contending directly with the arguments of Luther — namely, that free will did not exist — and adopted a middle-of-the-road position between Luther's skepticism and the Church's teaching. Aquinas was far less equivocal: he argued that free will was a necessary quality of humanity because that was how God willed it to be, but that the exercise of free will was contingent. In other words, Aquinas was able to distinguish between different kinds of freedom, whereas Erasmus was not (Watson, 1969).
With regard to education, Erasmus's humanism was most apparent. He felt that teachers should be open to alternative perspectives and not be constrained by local interests, narratives, or ways of thinking. The purpose of education, in Erasmus's view, was to create culturally and ethically minded individuals (Ornstein et al., 2013). For Aquinas, the purpose of education was to grow in Wisdom — that is, in closeness to God (Ozolins, 2013). Aquinas demonstrates in the Summa Theologica that the ultimate end of the universe is Truth, and that all teaching should be oriented toward God and Truth, which he identifies as the proper pursuit of the wise. The central difference in worldview between the two, then, is that Aquinas's view is oriented specifically toward God, while Erasmus's is oriented more toward man.
"Worldview as the foundation of any educational philosophy"
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