DEFINITIONS 

Knowing the world¹ 

Ancient Greek Hist.

Education, upbringing; spec. an Athenian system of instruction designed to give pupils a rounded cultural education, esp. with a view to public life. Hence: the sum of physical and intellectual achievement to which an individual or (collectively) a society can aspire; a society's culture.

The principal subjects of the classical paideia were rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, music, philosophy, geography, natural history, and gymnastics.²

"Paidagogeo, then, is the cultural reproduction of paideia, and paideia the manifestation of male-male practices; it is a manner of interpersonal reproduction via paidagogeo that results in cultural and political reproduction" (Gurley 357).

Paideia is defined as teaching children, but this definition, perhaps more than most, glosses over a more complete understanding of this conception and over-simplifies one of the most important concepts in ancient Greece, and arguably in Western culture's history, because the definition does not emphasize how paideia is "a concept of value, a consciously pursued ideal" (Jaeger xvii). The process of achieving that ideal and the methods of passing it along get more at the heart of paideia. The description seems to be closer to a self-imposed hegemony than a pedagogy, but this too is problematic because of the term "self-imposed." To the Greeks, the community was the corporeal component of rights, not the individual person. Individuals were parts of the whole. Perhaps to understand paideia then, we must understand the whole (polis) and its parts (areté and sophists).

POLIS

          The city-state

Understanding the city-state helps illustrate how the Greeks thought of themselves as part of a whole -- the polis. And there were two opposing social frameworks: the constitutional state (Ionian) and the Spartan military state (Doric?). Jaeger explains how these two states eventually merged into a cohesive policy created by politicians. From Sparta, Greeks created a new idealized form of community, one that is created and maintained through an education that "would determine how individualism might be repressed and the character of every citizen might be developed one communal model."³

ARETÉ

Excellence; noble character based on family, education, and physical strength. Leadership is a core component. Jaeger suggests that it "is a combination of proud and courtly morality with warlike valor."³

In the beginning of Greek culture, areté was based primarily on family, superlative ability, and superiority of physical strength and ability; however, as the city-state developed, the emphasis on specific characteristics of arete changed. It became less about family lineage and winning hard fought battles and more about logical thinking, mental ability, and being civilized. Men who were able to influence the polis and who were leaders of the city-state were seen to have arete, the highest honor. Naturally, the new nobles wanted a way to maintain this understanding of areté and began asking what types of education would create arete. Out of the new social milieu came new opportunities for men who could develop new mental abilities.

SOPHISTS

The polis (city-state) had shifted into a culture of civilized society. Education became focused on skills for a trade, but the newly defined ideal of citizenship needed a more thorough development than learning a trade. The new polis also allowed men who were not born of nobility to be able to achieve areté through learning of the mind -- that is, through logical thinking. This movement also put emphasis on being a politician -- a rhetor, an orator who leads the society. 

The Sophists began ask how education can create areté. 

Sources

Gurley, Jennifer. "Platonic Paideia." Philosophy and Literature 23.2 (1999): 351-377. Project Muse. 27 Oct. 2014.

Jaeger, Werner. Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture, 2nd Edition. Oxford UP: New York, 1945. Print.

"Paideia, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2014. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.

van Nijf, Onno. "Athletics and Paideia: Festivals and Physical Education in the World of the Second Sophistic." Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic. Ed. Barbara E. Borg. Walter de

Gruyter: Berlin, 2004. Print.