imagine I’m an aristocratic roman child in AD 463 Ravenna, and I’m being taught the the stories of homer as part of my education by a Greek school teacher. What might he say if I ask him what the “gods” in the stories really were if the church leaders say the Christian God is the only real god?
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I’m going to provide a slightly sideways answer to your question. If you’re using the setting of education to frame a question about religious beliefs, I’ll happily defer to religious scholars familiar with that era. I do, though, think it’s interesting to consider the nature of the exchange from a history of education perspective.
The scenario you’re describing – a child asks a tutor a question about faith based in the child’s understanding of the world – likely wouldn’t have happened because at its heart, your question reflects a teacher-student dynamic that’s fairly modern and I’ll get to that in a bit. But even before that, it’s worth stating explicitly that we don’t know if it would have happened at all. We just don’t know precisely how exchanges played out between teachers and students. My understanding of the Roman education structure is based on a few sources such as Stanley F. Bonner’s Education in Ancient Rome and The Oxford Handbook on the History of Education chapter on Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity. There may be sources that provide a different perspective but these two make it pretty clear we don’t have a good understanding of what teacher/student exchanges looked like.
Part of that is because no one was especially interested in documenting how teachers taught. We know a great deal about the structures of education in the era, who paid for whose services, and the general outlines of what was taught but what you’re asking about is something a little bit different. We also have a whole lot of adults documenting their memories of being taught and adults documenting how they claim to have taught, but lesson plans weren’t really a thing in AD 463 so specifics are kinda hazy and adults are universally bad at accurately conveying events from our childhood. In the modern era, beginning around the turn of the 20th century, the term pedagogy settled into meaning the specifics of how a teacher teaches (curriculum is, generally speaking, the what) and for the first time to speak of, scholars became interested in documenting the specifics. The term was around previously and there were other words to describe the ways in which a teacher would teach (i.e. dialogue – of which Socrates’ methods are the most well-known) but again, we don’t have any transcriptions of exchanges.
To offer one quick example, consider the concept of wait time. In effect, it’s how much time an adult waits after asking a question – or being asked a question – before speaking. Modern learning scientists who study how teaching and learning occur, have identified a dozen different variables around those silences that impact learning and recognize it as one of the most important components of pedagogy. So, to your question, the tutor may have heard the question, planned on counting to ten in silence and somewhere around five or six, you may have answered your own question with your theory and gone back to your studies. The rise of the child study movement and developmental psychology (I get into that a little bit here in the history of asking kids about their favorite color), means a tutor asking a similar question in the modern era would have been considering the concept of “developmentally appropriate” and waited longer for an older child or for a shorter period were you younger.
In addition to an answer based in religious dynamics and norms of the era, there’s also another possible option for your tutor; they could have said to you, “what do you think?” And that’s where we get to second interesting thing about your question – the issue of power dynamics in teaching. Your question presumes that you have the right and freedom to challenge knowledge, something a child in the time you’re asking about likely didn’t have. You wrote the question as if a child had spontaneously asked it, a behavior that is fairly common in modern teaching and adult/child interactions. You’re talking to a kid about what to make for dinner and suddenly they ask if everyone dies. And you likely take a deep breath and ask something like, “can you tell me why you’re asking?” Honoring their question in the moment reflects a world view that sees a child as a whole person with thoughts worthy of consideration.
There very likely have been adults at every moment in every society throughout human history who recognized children’s inner thoughts and honored questions they asked. However, they were not the norm. The shift to see children as full people unto themselves – not an extension of their parent, not a little version of the adult they would become – came about due to the efforts of activists in the Progressive moment in the early 20th century. It was progressives who advocated for child-sized furniture in schools, for child protection societies, and for a more child-centered approach to teaching.
All of which is to say, the response from your tutor to your question likely would have been a slightly furrowed brow, a momentary pause, and then a resumption of whatever lesson they were teaching when you rudely interrupted them.
Numerous Christian writers of the time subscribed to the idea that the gods of polytheistic religions were just heroic people from the super ancient past that the Greeks and Romans worshipped as gods. So they were viewed as idols, but at the same time the myths were part of a literary and cultural tradition that was considered valuable and important to a good education.
I believe that early Christian apologists like Justin, Theophilus, and Titian wrote about this, though IIRC you can find references to this idea in Augustine as well.