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Paideia in Higher Education

The concept of “paideia” emerged in ancient Greece when the focus of a formal education began to evolve from a preparation for the military to a preparation for the citizenry. While the exact meaning of the term paideia is open to interpretation, it is generally held that paideia refers to the “sum total of one’s educational experiences.” And, because its roots are firmly planted in classical Greek culture, the term historically has been associated with a liberal arts education. In the 1980’s, the concept of paideia was reintroduced to the American public through the publication of Mortimer Adler’s The Paidiea Proposal: An Educational Manifesto. In this book, Adler outlined an intentional and well-articulated liberal arts curriculum for K-12 schools and proposed that such an education was essential for the continued success of a democratic nation. To date, the curriculum outlined in the Paideia Proposal has been adopted by only a few schools, but the concept of paideia as a way of defining an education lives on.

In thinking about paideia as a way of “naming” an educational experience, one could successfully argue that all colleges and universities have a paideia. They all have a set of courses and experiences that define that college’s or university’s vision of what a person, educated for the citizenry, should know and/or be able to do. Unfortunately, these courses and experiences rarely are framed in such a way to provide the kind of intentionality that the term paideia implies. They often are merely a collection of courses and experiences that students encounter with very little sense of coherence or connectedness. Rather, students become skilled at navigating a set of requirements that at some point, we assume, will lead them to be educated. As a result, many of these students fulfill the requirements of the education, but miss the paideia – the intentional education for the citizenry that should be the goal of liberal learning.

The Paideia Program at Southwestern University is our attempt to provide a true “paideia experience” for our students. Like other colleges and universities, we have had an implicit paideia for years. Our paideia, like most other national liberal arts colleges, is based on a rigorous liberal arts academic experience that also includes rich and rewarding out-of-class experiences in the context of a residential living-learning environment. The key and most distinctive element of the Paideia Program was developed – the Paideia Seminar. In these seminars, our students have the unique opportunity to engage with a Paideia Professor and nine of their peers for three years in the exploration of connections and interrelatedness of the Southwestern University paideia. We believe this opportunity to engage in a “meta-discourse” about all of their learning experiences will cause our students to see their education as much more than a collection of courses and experiences – but as the Southwestern paideia in the truest sense of the word.

Several years ago, Southwestern University challenged itself to become an inspiration to other national liberal arts colleges. We believe the Paideia Program has the potential to do just that. To that end, we would like to propose the following elements that would be necessary to be a “Paideia College” in the 21st Century. To become a Paidiea College, a college or university must be willing to provide the following:

• A residential living-learning environment
• A rigorous, liberal arts academic program
• Extensive, personal interactions with faculty
• Enriching out-of-class experiences
• Most Importantly, a program to help students make intentional connections among these experience

In his best selling book Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds, Dr. Richard Light devotes an entire chapter to the value students place upon making powerful connections among their educational experiences. He states that “students who are able to integrate the in-class and outside-of-class parts of their lives can reap great benefits.” He further states that college faculty and administrators should help students to build an “educational package” and that we should “get in their way, in the most constructive sense, to help them make these powerful connections.” At Southwestern, we have defined our educational package – our paideia – and we have created the Paideia Program as way of getting in our students’ ways to help them understand the connections among all the experiences they encounter. We encourage others in higher education to consider ways in which they may do the same.

For more information about the Paideia Program, or to learn about its history and development, please contact Dr. David Gaines, Paideia Professor and Program Director, in Mood Bridwell 207 (863-1494, gainesd@southwestern.edu) o