Lewis-- Logo-Paideia--MWAAR 2014

Exploring a Religio-Cultural Process of Logo-Paideia in the American Context
James R. Lewis
Kent State University-- Cultural Foundations in Education
March, 2014 jlewis21@kent.edu
Foundational Concerns
An article in the local newspaper on the day of this writing described a house nearby whose
foundation was undermined (literally-- by a collapsing old coal mine underneath!), half of which
then broke away from under the house.1
The article indicated that the house and foundation can be
reconstructed-- but would require new and additional foundational support, rather than merely
repairing the former foundation. The cultural foundations of any society are most often deeply
rooted in the religious dynamics impacting that society, and in the U.S. American context, those
religious dynamics have been in significant dynamic flux since the cultural turn. Like the
“foundation” issues in that news story, this project is intended not to merely reclaim or repair former
religio-cultural foundations that were historically formative in the U.S. American context, but, by
coming to understand formerly functional social processes, to explore what is needed for what
might become newly functional foundational support. As the historic function of the religio-cultural
foundations of U.S. American society are well-established, the focus here is not to argue what
worked in the past, but to use a range of disciplinary tools to examine the dynamics of change,
especially how that change has been manifest through education, and thereby suggest and develop a
discourse to adequately describe those processes.
“Formation” of persons and identity can be approached from a range of directions. In
Western culture so thoroughly rooted in almost two millennia of Christian influence, most of which
1 Beacon journal...
James R. Lewis, Kent State University--Logo-Paideia 1

has been under the paradigm of socio-political cultures shaped by Constantinian Christian mentality,
thinking in terms of “formation” is rooted in traditions of spiritual formation drawn from that
Constantinian Christian culture.2
Such paradigms are inherently holistic, based as they are in an all-
encompassing, soul-deep ideology. As this project develops, I will build an argument toward the
use of the language of “logo-paiedia,” focusing on formation/paideia efforts built around the
making of meaning/logos as a social project.
Educational approaches in recent decades using language like “formation,” or
“transformation,” aimed at “holistic” approaches intended to shape the whole of the person,
however, tend to come either from “secular” perspectives, or what might be called “new age”
approaches.3
Such approaches eagerly embrace the holistic approach of traditional models of
Christian formation, but while what might be thought of as “new age” approaches tend to embrace
spirituality, despite being shaped by the assumptions and context of “Christendom,” they also tend
to conceptualize “spirituality” in ways that at the same time reject traditional Christian spirituality.
“Secular” perspectives, on the other hand, tend to be built on assumptions of philosophical
naturalism, in which the language of “spirituality” is out of place entirely. The commonality of both
sets of “holistic” or “formation” approaches, is that they tend to be adamant that “education” not
merely address “cognitive” development, but emphasize shaping the whole person, especially
inclusive of the individual's emotionality, moral framework, and motivations, often casting these
three domains as being closely and integrally related.4
2 These terms are most often used pejoraively, though I find it helpful to use the term in a more descriptive way to
encompass social relationships in which religion and society work cooperatively together in various ways, rather
than being at odds with each other. As summarized by Heim in 2011, in recent decades, the terms “Constantinian
Chistianity” and “Christendom” have be used pejoratively by or in discourse with a range of authors critiquing
association between “church and state,” both in the institutional and cultural senses, where there is any identifying
link between religion and political society. Such authors include John Howard Yoder, Sanley Hauerwas, Oliver
O'Donovan, Peter Leithart, Timmothy Furry and more.
3 This assessment based on a range of journals and their contents which use such terms as “formation,”
“transformation” and “holistic” in titles relating to education.
4 Thus far in my research, though these types of approaches are each integrally tied to distinct “comprehensive

Emotionality resides in and is a manifestation of the limbic system in the human brain.
While this project is not delving into the physiology of emotions, a consistent theme of educational
research is that the more educational processes involve the limbic system, the more effective those
educational efforts are. Any work in education, then, would be wise to keep this link in mind,
remembering that “embodied” educational efforts that tie into the learner's emotionality would be
most effective to explore. At the same time, the complexity and contestedness of both individual
morality and motivation must also be mentioned. While many writers in morality tie moral drives
to human emotion and compassion, in other well-established approaches to morality including most
religious perspectives, emotion plays virtually no part. In some frameworks, morality is
individually based, and in others, morality is not a function of the individual at all.
Likewise, while personal motivation is integrally important in education and is related to
both emotion and morality of any sort, how dynamics of motivation are understood is also
contested. For some writers, motivations are based in emotion, while for others, though emotion
can be a tool in the study of motivation, motivation is distinct from and often must work in spite of
emotion. Traditionally and for some writers, motivation is a function of religious or spiritual
conditions. Hence at the heart of “sin” in Christian traditions for example, where motivation for
“righteous living” and all that entails is a product of one's identity in Christ, while “sinful”
motivations are a product of one's identity as a “fallen” creature. Despite changes in American
culture impacting religion, the large majority of U.S. Americans identify with some form or
religious or spiritual tradition,5
therefore religion and spirituality-- unavoidably related to
doctrines”(concept drawn from John Rawls) that are often mutually exclusive of other competing comprehensive
doctrines that are equally covered by First Amendment protections. However, writers in these approaches I've
explored to date tend to either not notice or not care about issues of jurisprudence their approaches would instantiate
were they to guide public educational efforts. While this project itself does not address these concerns beyond their
mention here, the larger dissertation of which this project is a part will discuss this problem in more depth.
5 Pew forum note

emotionality, motivation and formation for most Americans-- cannot be simply ignored in public
discourse and policy pertaining to education.
The academic world has yet to come to a consensus as to exactly how emotionality works
due to the complexity of the range of philosophical frameworks by which emotional function is
understood, and the range of social, cultural, religious, spiritual, interpersonal, geo-political,
cognitive, behavioral and bio-chemical processes which shape the expression of emotions. Despite
a growing intensity of research, that lack of consensus is complicated when addressed to public
educational contexts, as mental frameworks-- to include how religion and spirituality are and are not
addressed in public and educational settings and how those impact emotions as related to learning
and personal formation-- may or may not be shaped by public policy. However, it is still safe to say
that much of the range of work in emotion across disciplines agrees on at least two facets of
emotion: Consensus can be said to support assertions both that emotion is closely tied with learning,
motivation, and behavior, and that the complexity of emotional differentiation both within and
across individuals is in some way shaped and expressed through both physiological and cognitive
processes. But this is not a project in physiology or psychology. It is, rather, a study of the
processes of education and formation that were traditionally grounded in and supported by a
religiously based culture. The intent of this project is to explore what range of religio-cultural
processes contributed to the conveyance of functional socially supported meaning structures in the
United States--that are usually shaped by religious and spiritual dynamics--that were successful in
the formation of even the limbic/emotional levels of personal identity.
While much current work on emotion is exploring processes at the individual level--thereby
not directly addressing socio-cultural variables--thinkers from ancient Greece to the present day
working at social levels often agree that socio-cultural processes also impact emotionality by

various means. My research has been interdisciplinary, drawing on insights and building on
strengths of various facets of research from distinct disciplines. As such, my research suggests that
the heart of formation is a holistic process composed of learned, learn-able and embodied habituated
practices--conveyed through processes of paideia. As my research is primarily educational, it will
proceed from this point, despite a significant complicating tangent which bears mention here.
Education, formation and challenges of pluralism
Any question pertaining to “formation” begs the question of what is being formed, which in
turn begs questions of normative philosophy: what should be formed? In terms of identity-- very
often integrally related to religious identity formation--such philosophical questions are particularly
challenging in an era of pluralistic, constructivist discourse. The question of “what should be?”
becomes all the more challenging: Discerning what “should” be in terms of social formational
goals, prior to the cultural turn, had been a relatively easy process, as “the aims of education” had
generally been developed within the consensus of what had been the prevailing hegemonic pseudo-
“Constantinian Christian” assimilating American “Judeo-Christian” framework. But after the
cultural turn, lacking any social consensus on common foundational values within the U.S.
American context, “we” now need to ask what “should be,” – and according to whom? Why this
whom and not another--especially in the pluralistic American context with mutually protected,
though often incompatible comprehensive doctrines6
? And who is the “we” who can legitimately
ask these questions? Who is the “we” who has any form of authority to attempt to answer these
questions or shape the policy by which public processes of education attempt to enculturate
emerging generations?
6 “Comprehensive doctrine” term borrowed from John Rawls, to be addressed more later.

These questions necessarily include building blocks dependent upon distinct, often mutually
exclusive comprehensive doctrines. Some of these comprehensive doctrines on which people
groups variously build their identities are very often spiritual or religious in nature, often requiring
some form of a theistic or metaphysical ontology, while others may be based in the foundational
assumptions of philosophical naturalism or the like, which can inherently obviate any theistic or
“metaphysical” ontology. Because of these often incompatible, often religiously based foundational
thought systems, if public educational institutions were to embrace or reject any particular system of
thought, those public institutions would then be endorsing a particular religious ideology or belief
system. Though often ignored in public contexts, this facet of formation discourse-- educational
and otherwise-- therefore necessarily entails the need to take seriously issues of jurisprudence
pertaining to First Amendment protections.7
Historically, persons tend to be born into particular human and familial contexts. Within
each of those contexts, someone has authority and responsibility over the new lives being brought
into the world, new lives which for a time are liabilities, but which in time, can become resources to
their communities and the parents who brought them into the world. That community--mediated by
its physical environment and external parameters such as human and natural blessings and threats,
as well as the particular and contingent characteristics of each person-- shapes the holistic social
world of its inhabitants. That social world includes its physical, economic, cultural, religious, moral
and meaning frames, shaped by cultural phenomena that have the capacity to evolve across time,
but which function as less-than-dynamic, posited parameters while persons grow into their worlds.
“Education” is the process by which one generation of parents, in conjunction with their
community, transforms their progeny from liabilities to resources for themselves and their
7 While this important area of concern needs to be mentioned here, it will only be further addressed in the larger
dissertation of which this project is a part.

communities within the physical, social, economic, moral and cultural frameworks by which they
live:
Education is such a natural and universal function of society that many generations accept
and transmit it without question or discussion: thus the first mention of it in literature is
relatively late. Its content is roughly the same in every nation-- it is both moral and
practical. It consisted partly of commandments...partly of ancient rules of practical
wisdom and prescriptions of external morality; and partly of those professional skills and
traditions which ... the Greeks named techne.8
Education of the techne sort, toward the skillsets and knowledge needed for mere economic
independent functioning-- I'll here call this “economic education”-- is typically the central theme of
public schooling as currently practiced in the U.S. This is contrasted to education in its broader
sense as formation of souls and citizens, sometimes called “paideia.”
Formation as paideia
Building on his classical philological training, Werner Jaeger wrote in the early twentieth
century on the ancient Greek conception of education as paideia and its incorporation into the
ideology of Christendom,9
becoming essential reading in the later twentieth century for those
interested in education as formation. Jaeger traced the evolution of Greek concepts of education
into and through the emerging culture of Christendom that was so formative to America's
“Founding Fathers.”10
And though Jaeger wrote almost two centuries after the Founding Fathers
wrote their formative documents, the thought that Jaeger systematically pulls together was the grist
of the classical education on which the Founding Fathers were raised. The dots may not have been
8 Werner Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 3.
9 I am using the term “Christendom” in these Comps Questions to refer specifically to the worldview/ comprehensive
doctrine shaped by the political arrangements in Western Europe from Christianity's becoming the official religion of
the Roman Empire, and the subsequent arrangements in which the religion is political, socially and ideologically tied
to the governing authority structures. This cultural context in foundational to the cultural Christianity, or “habits of
mind” Kennedy discusses, as already addressed.
10 My apologies to any who may take offense to this term. I use this term as is both because it is convenient short hand
to include the thought of a certain group of influential people at the founding of what is now these United States, and
that distinct and concise group does happen to be all men.

so clearly connected for them, but the substance of this paideia that Jaeger later described was part
of the raw material from which the American foundational documents and ideas were born.
Through the classical Greek and the Early Church Fathers,11
Jaeger traces the development
of ideas of knowledge (gnosis), education (paideia), God/Divine Source (Logos-- which Frankl
from a more secular perspective, understands as “meaning”-- hence his existentialist approach he
called “Logo-therapy”12
), the good (agatha), and Providence (pronoia), the city/ political realm
(polis), and the church (ekklesia), all of which are integrally pertinent to current conceptions of
education as formation and their inherent challenges. Aristotle and Plato are among those ancient
Greeks often thought of with the beginnings of education. Central to Aristotle's writings on
education are the themes of virtue ethics. Fascinating as being foundational to this study, is that the
concern with what I will be calling “habituated patterns” in character and spiritual formation goes
back at least as far as Aristotle in his concept of virtue:
Virtue, then, is of two sorts, virtue of thought and virtue of character. Virtue of thought
arises and grows mostly from teaching, and hence needs experience and time. Virtue of
character [i.e. of eethos] results from habit [ethos]; hence its name 'ethical', differs slightly
from 'ethos'. Virtue comes about, not by a process of nature, but by habituation-- Hence it is
also clear that none of the virtues of character arises in us naturally.13
It was a short leap for the Early Church Fathers, for America's Founding Fathers, and for
Jaeger to translate Aristotle's ideas about virtue, into what emerged in Christendom as the Christian
virtues, as spiritual formation, and as integral pieces to what it meant to be an ideal citizen in the
early colonists' “city on a hill” ideology. In short and merely hitting the highlights, Jaeger traces the
early Christian appropriation of Greek philosophical heritage in which Plato is thought of much as a
pagan Moses, and in which in the Providence (pronoia) of God (Logos) is “the true paideia ... the
11 Ditto the footnote pertaining to “Founding Fathers.”
12 Frankl footnote
13 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Terence Irwin, (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket Publishing Company, 1985), p.
33, 2.1.

Christian religion itself,”14
in which the knowledge/gnosis that education/paideia conveys is the
knowledge/gnosis of God. Returning to ancient pre-Christian Greek roots, some writers would
return to Aristotle to understand the knowledge/gnosis that education/paideia conveys as being the
knowledge of the virtues toward the good/agathoid, or like Frankl with his secular lens, understand
knowledge/gnosis as what it takes to create a meaningful life from the existential morass.15
The universal and universalizing nature of Christianity and the Christian paideia is directly
rooted in the universal and universalizing character of Hellenistic culture which is foundational to
Christianity in both its Constantinian and in other forms.16
Jaeger traces the connection between
the Christian paideia and the enduring essential, if often hidden and only partial, goodness of the
cosmos, by building on Plato whom Jaeger says “stood like a rock with his conviction that the seed
of the good is to be found in everything and in the nature of being itself. Only that which he calls
the agathoid element in all things really 'is.'”17
He also traces through Origen the moral agency of
the individual as the ground of human dignity.
In blending Greek, biblical, and early Christian thought, Jaeger builds on Origen and
reiterates Plato, saying: “God is the pedagogue of the universe, ho theos paidagogei ton kosmon. ...
(and) Christ is for Origen the educator who transfers these sublime ideas to reality... Paideia is thus
the gradual fulfillment of the divine providence.”18
Such an understanding of formative education
seems to be a bridge between the Classical influence that was so important to the Founding Fathers
and the parallel Christian worldview. Sounding much like John Winthrop's ideas about colonial
New England becoming the New Jerusalem, a “city(polis) on a hill” as a light to the lost, Jaeger
wrote of the emergence and formation of the Church as a corporate, institutional body in the late
14 Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 61-62.
15 Frankl again
16 Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 63.
17 Ibid., 64.
18 Ibid., 66-67.

first and early second centuries:
It is significant that at that critical moment the ideals of the political philosophies of the
ancient Greek city-state entered the discussion of the new Christian type of human
community, now called the church, but in Greek ekklesia... originally meant the assembly
of the citizens of a Greek polis.19
Secularizing stream of thought
However, despite the thoroughly Greco-Christian rootedness20
of American culture from
before the Founding Fathers and into Jaeger's era, a parallel, secular narrative leading to a
foundationally different understanding of education as formation has also been evident across the
life of these United States. Also writing in the early to mid 20th
century, John Dewey insisted on
both psychological and social components or needs for education.21
The child is no isolated soul in
his understanding, but the child and the educational process are inextricably linked to the
community and its “social consciousness,”22
finding meaning in relation to the community in which
s/he exists. Dewey discusses at length the place of social experience in education and the
importance of community in shaping both the learner and the meaning of the educational enterprise.
In reflecting on radical social changes society goes through in the process of modernization, he
states in the conclusion of the most widely read and translated of his works:
If our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an equally complete
transformation...To do this means to make each of our schools an embryonic community
life... When the school introduces and trains each child of society into a membership
within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him
with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best
guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious.”23
Alfred North Whitehead, almost an exact contemporary of Dewey, writing on the other side
19 Jaeger, Early Christianity, 15.
20 Crunden.
21 Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” 20
22 Ibid., 19.
23 Dewey, “The School and Society,” 49.

of the Atlantic, was also quite concerned with a process of formation for students that sounds
student-centric in ways akin to Dewey's American pragmatism. In beautiful language that is almost
poetic, he depicts education as an aesthetic process:
Education is the guidance of the individual towards a comprehension of the art of life; and
by the art of life I mean the most complete achievement of varied activities expressing the
potentialities of that living creature in the face of its actual environment. ... Each individual
embodies an adventure of existence. The art of life is the guidance of this adventure.24
For Whitehead, education requires leading students into an encounter with the past by which they
apprehend valuable resources that can contribute to their own adventure: “It is the function of the
scholar to evoke into life wisdom and beauty which, apart from his magic, would remain lost in the
past.”25
These varying strains of thought are rightly concerned about the formation of souls and
citizens, and about roles of education in this process. If formation is shaping who people are as
selves/souls, who are active, purposive agents in the world, much of that “purposiveness” of human
agency is guided by the forming society through its own educational/ formational processes toward
forming the self/soul for its social role in the continuation and advancement of its society.
However, when reading through these strains of thought, it is so easy to get caught up in the ideas as
it sometimes seems such authors as these do, and forget the subtle but important distinctions
between these three interrelated domains of education, schooling, and formation.
It seems that most writers agree that these domains are thoroughly intertwined through the
mutually the interacting facets of human experience that include cognition, emotion, motivation,
morality, comprehensive doctrines (which are often though not always religious in nature) and
embodied agentive action. Recognizing these intertwining relationships, it would seem they could
24 A. N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1929), 61.
25 Ibid., 147.

be easily charted to depict how they are inter-related. However, such charts would appear
dramatically different from these various perspectives because of the different, even mutually
exclusive ways foundational understandings of what is real and what is important are construed in
the differing comprehensive doctrines undergirding those approaches.26
Forging public chains of memory for logo-paideia
How we understand what is real and what is important is foundational to whatever systems
of meaning into which we are formed. However, meaning systems are neither organic to human
biology, and, as much as we like to think of ourselves as being independent navigators through life,
nor are meaning systems autonomously developed. Even the words and concepts we pretend we are
using to construct our own worlds are necessarily intertwined with social usages as Wittgenstein
showed,27
therefore all meaning systems, from individual concepts to metaphysical meaning
structures, are socially constructed. Along similar lines, theorists such as the Symbolic
Interactionist school of thought, and more recently, Danielle Hervieu-Leger, have pointed out that
meaning systems are not only socially constructed, but “vehicled” from person to person, generation
to generation, through socially constructed, maintained and conveyed “chains of memory.”28
The social conveyance of meaning systems is most often “vehicled” across generations by
systems of education. Where those educational systems are tailored to distinct people groups,
conveying their distinct meaning and value systems as is often the case through private educational
systems, those distinct meaning systems are preserved, yet are public civic values also conveyed
through such systems? However, where public educational systems have become normative,
meaning systems (though quite often religious or spiritual in nature) must also be conveyed-- both
26 See charts in appendix
27 Wittgenstein note
28 Daniele Hervieu-Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
2000), discussed more in depth in Q3

those appropriate to the differing religious traditions, as well as those that bridge distinct religious
or spiritual traditions, and which are a part of the common culture required for civil co-existence.
But these public “chains of memory” must also keep in mind issues of jurisprudence related to
religious freedoms protected by the First Amendment, when public education is built on and
conveys distinct comprehensive doctrines and understandings of what is real and important, which
may conflict with distinct religious ideologies.
Where Frankl developed a secular tool of “Logotherapy” to address individual problems
resulting from the existential vacuum, might a system of pluralistic logo-paideia be developed that
is capable of addressing these concerns of jurisprudence to help public institutions within
Constitutional parameters, facilitate a culture of “formation”? Such an approach would necessarily
be inclusive of, but not forcing “religious identity formation,” and would need to take seriously the
problems of conflicting comprehensive doctrines and get past the predominant illusory form of not-
so-pluralistic-pluralism only briefly noted herein. Public institutions are able to promote a culture
of physical fitness through a public education/paideia emphasizing the need for habituated patterns
and disciplines leading to conditions of physical fitness. No freedom of, nor substantive form of
physical expression is abrogated in this approach, but it is evident that promoting a pluralism of
physical fitness is an important way that public institutions fulfill the governmental role whereby it
will “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity.”29
Might a form of Logo-Paideia, conveyed through a range of educational systems meet
the same Constitutional end, and in so doing, help address the public existential vacuum of meaning
identified by Frankl that feeds a culture of suicide?
29 U.S. National Archives, The Constitution of the United States of America,, www.archives.gov (accessed November
30, 2012).

Lewis-- Logo-Paideia--MWAAR 2014

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