Students of philosophy, of Classics and of the history of education know of Socrates’ symbolic and Plato’s textual importance for the process and purpose of education. Nowadays specialists far more than generalists know of Isocrates’ ideas and great influence. But Aristotle as a thinker about education? S.’s detailed and clear exposition aims to argue that education was a topic of great interest to Aristotle. Certainly, as S. notes (pp. 18–19), Aristotle was responding to Meno’s question as to whether aretê can be taught, practised or comes from nature (Plato, Meno 70a) and thus presents the three factors of nature (physis), habituation (ethos) and rational learning (logos). The difficulty is that education receives sporadic, not direct, sustained treatment in the Aristotelian corpus. S.’s book is both industrious (and so very useful) – she tracks down and discusses the many passages throughout Aristotle’s works – and intellectually ambitious – she wants to relate Aristotle’s thinking about education and the child to all areas of Aristotle’s inquiry: anthropological, psychological, ethical, epistemological and ontological. For this latter goal S. indicates connections, but at times one feels she is arguing for what Aristotle might have said if a student had asked him to resolve a contradiction or substantiate a suggestion.

This revised version of a PhD dissertation (University of Bonn, Germany) comprises an introduction, chapters on nature, habituation, habituation vs instruction, the child, the educator and the relation to the child, moral motivation, moral motivation in the child and a conclusion.

S. presents the relevant issues and frames her inquiry well: for Aristotle ethical formation is not a question of rules or direction but a process, the transformation of the child into the ideal man, the phronimos or spoudaios. A child does not and cannot have aretê, a man can. Paideia requires both habituation and instruction, the former for the irrational, the latter for the rational part of the soul. And this rational paideia develops the ability to discern the good/decide the good action (phronesis). S., following some, but not all scholars, believes that Aristotle does not view these as two distinct phases. S. must then argue for the ongoing intellectual-ethical development of the child and some sort of alternation or mutual influence between habituation and philosophical instruction/self-direction. (I must add that ‘child’ means ‘free-born son’; while S. touches on the issue at several points, I missed a comprehensive account of how the child fits into the spectrum of Aristotle’s idea of the human being, which is, essentially, the free-born male, imperfectly realised in the spectrum of free-born male manqué – woman, boy, girl, slave, foreigner, animal.)

In particular S. argues: (1) children are the subject of education, with some basic form of judgement making; (2) intelligence is a successive process tied to natural stages; (3) habituation has pre-forms of rationality; (4) abstract thinking and moral learning are tied together. She is perhaps most successful with (1). Much of the other material reflects a consensus of Aristotle scholars (S. rightly acknowledges the impetus to all of this from M. Burnyeat, ‘Aristotle on Learning to be Good’, in: A.O. Rorty [ed.], Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics [1981], pp. 69–92). Unfortunately for (1), although she cites two articles by H. Fossheim, she does not seem to know his very relevant article ‘Aristotle on Children and Childhood’, in: R. Aasgaard and C. Horn (edd.), Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (2017), pp. 27–55. For (2) and (4), like N. Sherman (p. 15 n. 12), S. challenges the view that habituation (ethos) and instruction (didachê) form two separate steps and argues that, even though habituation has to come first and has to prepare someone to be willing to listen to arguments (pp. 172–8), it is essential for the development of the child that there is a period of development in which habituation and instruction overlap (pp. 14–19; 143–5, 287–8). It is not the case that there is a process of many years of habituation and then a sudden switch to rationality and instruction. On the contrary, the child develops his or her rationality over the course of many years, and the child’s teaching will therefore be a combination of habituation and instruction (p. 18); S. thus wants to see children not as objects, but as subjects of their education as they choose to try to imitate their examples (p. 18). This seems reasonable, but I am not convinced that Aristotle squarely answers how a child who is irrational like an animal or an acratic person becomes a rational moral actor. He does acknowledge that children are much more malleable than adults (pp. 158–60), and S. follows, for example, A. Coles’s ‘gradual account of childhood’ (p. 165 n. 509: ‘Animal and Childhood Cognition in Aristotle’s Biology and the Scala Naturae’, in: W. Kullmann and S. Föllinger [edd.], Aristotelische Biologie [1997], pp. 287–323). Gradual and malleable are fine empirical observations, but do not amount to much of an explanation.

Nonetheless, readers will find in S.’s book an intelligent, clearly written exposition of the state of scholarship on an important topic in Aristotle.