Paideia

Paideia is indeed about the ideals of Greek culture as Jaeger saw them expressed in poets, historians, philosophers, orators, from Homer through Plato down to the last voices of free Athens. But as Jaeger
himself noted, his German subtitle better describes what it is really about: not a static set of timeless ideals but a dynamic, here-and-now process, die Formung des Menschen, the forming of human beings. Paideia is a word we translate as “education,” but which (I use the cool wording of Liddell and Scott’s Greek lexicon) means not only the rearing and education of children (pais is the simple Greek for child) but, by an extension astonishing to us but not to Greeks, “mental culture, ciuilisation,” and then “objectively, the literature
and accomplishments of an age or people.” It was rendered in Latin as humanitas.