Paideia

The intellectual principle of the Greeks is not individualism but “humanism,” to use the word in its original and classical sense. It comes from humanitas: which, since the time of Varro and Cicero at least, possessed a nobler and severer sense in addition to its earlier vulgar sense of humane behavior, here irrelevant. It meant the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature. That is the true Greek paideia, adopted by the Roman statesman as a model. It starts from the ideal, not from the individual. Above man as a member of the horde, and man as a supposedly independent personality, stands man as an ideal; and that ideal was the pattern towards which Greek educators as well as Greek poets, artists, and philosophers always looked. But what is the ideal man? It is the universally valid model of humanity which all individuals are bound to imitate. We have pointed out that the essence of education is to make each individual in the image of the community; the Greeks started by shaping human character on that communal model, became more and more conscious of the meaning of the process, and finally, entering more deeply into the problem of education, grasped its basic principles with a surer, more philosophical comprehension … The ideal of human character which they wished to educate each individual to attain was not an empty abstract pattern, existing outside time and space. It was the living ideal which had grown up in the very soil of Greece … This was not recognized by the classicists and humanists of earlier generations … they left history out of account and construed the “humanity,” the “culture,” or the “mind” of Greece or of classical antiquity as the expression of an absolute and timeless ideal. (Werner Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 1, pp. xxiii-xxiv).