Paideia Gloriae Dei

What is paideia?

The term paideia (“pie-day-uh”) is a word that comes from ancient Greece.

It means discipline or training; education and upbringing. In short it refers to education. But it goes much deeper than what we have been trained to think of as education. Paideia means transmitting the entire culture. In addition to transferring knowledge, education is the transmission of values, culture, and the proper ordering of loves. When Paul charged the Ephesians to train up their children in the paideia of the Lord (Eph. 6:4 - Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord) – this is exactly what he was talking about. Sadly today, with the lack of piety in our culture, we don’t have a fixed culture to transmit. Our culture’s values and commitments are up in the air and always changing.

Education is more than just reading, math, science, history, and taking tests. With a Christian worldview, we have to consider it as more than just education. It goes deeper. Paideia is the perfect word and concept. We are training up our children in all areas of life to be well-rounded, with broad understandings in the things of life. We want our children to have a diverse education. The goal is for them to emerge from our homeschool as articulate, mature, image-bearers of God. 

All things are created by God and for God. And this should be reflected in our education. Everything we learn points to the attributes of God. And in our learning and exploration, we reflect God to others. I love the mission statement for Classical Conversations: “To know God and make Him known.” This sums up the goals of education or paideia. For me, a combination of classical education with Charlotte Mason is the perfect mix for our homeschool.

From Merriam-Webster:
Paideia is the “training of the physical and mental faculties in such a way as to produce a broad enlightened mature outlook harmoniously combined with maximum cultural development”

From Britannica:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/paideia

Paideia, (Greek: “education,” or “learning”), system of education and training in classical Greek and Hellenistic (Greco-Roman) cultures that included such subjects as gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, music, mathematics, geography, natural history, and philosophy. In the early Christian era the Greek paideia, called humanitas in Latin, served as a model for Christian institutions of higher learning, such as the Christian school of Alexandria in Egypt, which offered theology as the culminating science of their curricula. The term was combined with enkyklios (“complete system,” or “circle”) to identify a large compendium of general education, hence “encyclopaedia.”