Paideia

Paideia (παιδεία) — Formation, education and culture: the process by which the human being and the citizen are shaped according to an ideal. The word derives from pais (“child”) and at first designated the rearing and instruction of the young; in time it came to mean the culture that makes someone fully human. In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the Sophists, such as Protagoras, presented themselves as teachers of political and rhetorical excellence (arete), and Isocrates made formation through the word the centre of his school. Plato set against this a philosophical paideia: in the Republic (VII, 518b–d), education is not a matter of putting knowledge into an empty soul, as if putting sight into blind eyes, but of turning (periagōgē) the whole soul from shadow toward light, as in the allegory of the cave. Aristotle, in the Politics (Book VIII), holds that education should be a public concern, because it shapes citizens for the constitution of the city. The classic modern study of the theme is Werner Jaeger’s Paideia: Die Formung des griechischen Menschen (3 vols., 1934–1947), which reads the history of Greek culture as the history of the formation of man; it was translated into English by Gilbert Highet. The Roman tradition rendered the ideal as humanitas, and humanist and modern pedagogy reworked it. See also arete, doxa, episteme and alma; the central thinkers are Plato and Aristotle.

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