I talk a lot about Thomas Aquinas on this blog. The truth is, I'm not a theologian, and I'm certainly not a Thomist, as in one who discourses on Thomas with expertise. Like you, perhaps, I am – as the essay I'm about to link to suggests – grasping at shards of a larger conversation, a larger idea, and struggling constantly to put them into context. I have understood some basic things, I think, about a particular corner of that conversation, but I wouldn't claim to have understood everything. Not even close.
Still, here is a larger context that I think I do divine from what I have read, and I think it's an excellent starting place for conversation about education, particularly. If we're asking things like what is a human being, how do human beings learn and know, and what is there to BE known, we could do worse than to orient ourselves from this starting point:
For Aquinas the goal is already partly with us in the journey itself. For him the world is good—but not good enough. For him there is no evil in this material creation. Everything that is, is good. Every being has God within it holding it in being. It is just that some goods are greater than others. Evil comes in when we neglect some great good for the sake of some trivial good: when we sacrifice, say, being just and loving for the sake of being rich. Evil, for Aquinas, is a purely spiritual thing. It belongs to the world of minds and policies and decisions—and even there it is not a positive thing but a failure, a failure to want the good enough. The material world, however, is innocent, and more than innocent; it is the scintillating manifestation of the love of God.
Just reading this is thrilling to me. I hope it is to you, too, and that you will enjoy the rest of this essay by the late Herbert McCabe, OP, reprinted by permission in Church Life Journal.