Abstract

Jaeger's proposal in his 1933 work, Paideia, that classical Greece should be viewed as the origin and the sustaining source of Westem civilization is likely to be viewed today as, at best, quaint or, at worst, pemicious. But I argue that Jaeger's conception of paideia as acculturation or as the formation of character through culture is superior to current views of human development and education. At the same time, Jaeger accounts for the profundity of the classical Greek conception of education or acculturation by appealing to a relatively late Platonic notion of a universal standard or rational principle. I attempt to show that this late philosophical determination of paideia distorts an older Greek view of human culture, a view that might offer a model for a universalism that need not appeal to the idea of a self-grounding rational principle.