ABSTRACT
Among the many intellectual treasures left to the modern world by the ancient Greeks is the notion of paideia. In contrast to the term banausos, which means technical, skill-building education, paideia refers to the education of whole persons toward the pursuit of achieving the full development of what it means to be human (Fotopoulos, 2005). In ancient Greece, this meant a well-rounded education that included the development of the mind, body and spirit through the inclusion of diverse disciplines like mathematics, rhetoric, music and gymnastics. Today, as Cornel West (2009: 22) conveys, it means something more like ‘a deep education’ that connects us ‘to profound issues in serious ways’. As he goes on to explain, paideia ‘instructs us to turn our attention from the superficial to the substantial, from the frivolous to the serious. [It] concerns the cultivation of self, the ways you engage your own history, your own memories, your own mortality, your own sense of what it means to be alive as a critical, loving, aware human being’.
