The name for the project is carefully chosen. PAEDEIA it is not just an abbreviation; in Ancient Greece where according to some philosophers subjectivity was discovered (Foucault, 1997), paedeia (cf. paideia) or education for excellence or self-cultivation was considered a leisure activity and the highest good for having a flourishing life. Self-cultivation meant not only knowing yourself, but also taking care of self before taking care of others, and thus the city-state. To obtain a good life, one had to live virtuously or ethically. During Christianity the care of self was lost and replaced by worshipping God for salvation in the afterlife and ethics became more focused on the other, than on oneself. Nowadays, we still can see this in some professions, such as teaching, where helping the other, the student is the parole instead of cultivating yourself as teacher. Sacrificing yourself for your students’ education will not nourish you as teacher and human being; it will not question what teaching can contribute to the good life of a teacher. Obviously, it is an old Christian element that survived through time into our late-modern society. However, not only the training of students in becoming good citizens, but also the self-cultivation through their practice in schools is without doubt equally important. But what if education policies don’t support this quest for self-cultivation? What if education is too much directed towards what is necessary in our contemporary economy? And what if our standards and competences with its focus on measurable outcomes and behaviour are precluding the end of (liberal) education for self-cultivation and the beginning of only lifelong vocational training? If so, how can we in initial teacher training, in induction programs and continuous professional development safeguard a practice that brings self-cultivation of teachers back into the limelight of our education systems?

Foucault, M. (1997). Technologies of the Self, in P. Rabinow (ed.) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1. New York: New Press. Higgins, C. (2011). The Good Life of Teaching. An Ethics of Professional Practice. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Nussbaum, M.C. (2010). Not for Profit. Why Democracy needs the Humanities. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Taubman, P.M. (2009). Teaching by Numbers. Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. New York: Routledge.