I want so bad for education to mean eudaimonia.

"Edumonia" is a good coinage, but here's the thing — the tradition you're already steeped in basically grants your wish. Aquinas defines education as promotio prolis usque ad perfectum statum hominis in quantum homo est, qui est status virtutis — the bringing of a child all the way to the perfected state of the human as human, which is the state of virtue. For him, education just is formation toward flourishing. Anything less doesn't merit the name.

Aristotle's the same: the whole last book of the Politics is about paideia, and its explicit purpose is habituating the young into the virtues so they can participate in the eudaimonia of the polis. Education wasn't credentialing or information transfer — it was the polis reproducing its capacity for the good life.

So the ache in your sentence isn't that the concept doesn't exist. It's that we swapped it out. Somewhere along the line education became instruction (content delivery) plus certification (signaling), and the formation-of-the-person part got orphaned — or outsourced to whatever's left of family, parish, and fraternity. Which might be exactly why something like a seminary MA appeals: it's one of the few remaining institutional forms where the old definition is still the operating assumption. Formation is the word they use on purpose.

How close was the Jesuit pedagogical paradigm?

Quite close — arguably the most institutionally successful attempt at retrieval in the modern era, though with a distinctly different center of gravity than the Thomistic one.

The Ratio Studiorum (1599) explicitly aimed at more than instruction. The Jesuit formula was eloquentia perfecta — but eloquence understood as wisdom speaking, the fusion of learning, virtue, and expression. The stated end of the whole system was the formation of the person toward God, with humanistic and philosophical studies as the ladder. That's education-as-formation, full stop. And it worked at scale: hundreds of colleges across Europe within a century, the closest thing to a unified virtue-oriented curriculum the West has produced since antiquity.

The modern restatement — the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm of the 1990s, with its cycle of context, experience, reflection, action, evaluation — keeps the shape. Notice what that cycle is structurally: it's habituation. Experience alone doesn't form; reflection converts experience into meaning, and action converts meaning into character, and the loop repeats. That's Aristotle's hexis-formation dressed in twentieth-century language. The slogan version, cura personalis plus forming "men and women for others," is a eudaimonist telos with a Christological inflection — flourishing defined as self-gift.

Where it diverges from your Thomistic frame is interesting, though. The Ignatian paradigm is voluntarist and affective in emphasis — discernment, the movements of the heart, election. Aquinas builds from the intellect outward: you can't love what you don't know, so formation is first the perfection of the speculative and practical intellect, with charity as the form that orders everything. The Jesuit system is more like: engage the whole person in experience, and let reflection draw the intellect along. Both end at virtue; they enter the house through different doors.

The honest caveat: the paradigm on paper and the median Jesuit university in 2026 are not the same thing. The framework survived; the institutional will to enforce a curriculum ordered to it mostly didn't. Which is your orphaning problem again — the blueprint for edumonia exists in multiple traditions, and the scarce thing is a community that still builds from it.

Ok well regardless of Catholicism and ones personal hook, aren't there many potential hooks for people coming from a wide variety of intellectual backgrounds to engage Aristotle in a very sophisticated way? 

Yes — and this is actually one of the strongest arguments for Aristotle as a common curriculum: he's the rare thinker with load-bearing entry points from nearly every serious discipline.

From analytic philosophy: virtue ethics was revived largely by secular philosophers — Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy," Philippa Foot, Bernard Williams's critique of the "morality system." None of them needed Aquinas. Anscombe's argument was precisely that ethics without a divine lawgiver has to go back to Aristotle, because obligation-talk is incoherent without one. MacIntyre entered as a Marxist, note — After Virtue's engine is a sociological argument about the failure of the Enlightenment project, and the Thomism came a decade later.

From biology and cognitive science: Aristotle is the only major ethicist whose moral theory is continuous with his biology. Function, capacity, development, the organism's characteristic activity — this is why people like Foot (in Natural Goodness) and even hard naturalists find him workable where Kant is not. There's a live research program treating eudaimonia as a testable construct in psychology — the whole positive psychology movement is warmed-over Aristotle, sometimes admitted, sometimes not. Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory reads like a lab-coat translation of energeia.

From economics and political science: the capabilities approach. Sen and Nussbaum built a rival to GDP-utilitarianism directly out of Aristotelian potentiality — what is a person able to be and do. That's now embedded in the UN Human Development Index. A development economist can reach sophisticated Aristotle without ever touching a page of theology.

From AI and action theory: practical syllogism, phronesis as non-codifiable expertise, the frame problem. Dreyfus's critique of symbolic AI was essentially Aristotelian-Heideggerian: skilled coping can't be reduced to rules. Anyone thinking hard about why you can't fully specify good judgment in advance is doing Nicomachean Ethics VI whether they know it or not.

From literature and psychoanalysis: the Poetics, catharsis, character as revealed through action. Martha Nussbaum's Fragility of Goodness entered through Greek tragedy — moral luck, the vulnerability of the good life to fortune — which is an entry point for anyone whose intuitions are tragic rather than providential.

From physics and metaphysics, even: the revival of dispositional essentialism and powers ontology in analytic metaphysics (Cartwright, Mumford, Ellis) is a rehabilitation of Aristotelian causation, driven by problems in philosophy of science, not piety.

So the structural fact is this: Aristotle sits upstream of the disciplinary fragmentation itself. He wrote the founding text of half the disciplines, so each one retains a dialect in which he's still legible. That's what makes him uniquely suited to be a commons — a Confucian, a Marxist, a biologist, and a Thomist can have a genuinely joint seminar on NE II in a way that's impossible with Augustine or Kant. The Catholic hook is one door into a building that has doors on every side.

The interesting asymmetry: most of these traditions take the ethics and politics while quietly declining the metaphysics that Aristotle thought grounded them. Whether virtue ethics can stand without the teleological biology is the live dispute — Foot and Hursthouse say yes with a naturalized teleology, MacIntyre eventually said no, hence his move. So the many hooks are real, but they pull toward different Aristotles, and part of the sophistication is discovering the disagreement is about him, not just applications of him.

ok great now bring this home with a nice conclusion. 

So bring the three threads together and the shape of the thing emerges.

You started by wishing education meant eudaimonia. It turns out the wish is really a memory: the classical and medieval world simply defined education that way, and the Jesuits proved the definition could be institutionalized at civilizational scale. What was lost was not the idea but the shared foundation under it — once the West fragmented into rival moral vocabularies, no one could agree on what "flourishing" meant, so schools retreated to the only things everyone could still agree on: information and credentials. Edumonia didn't fail; it was orphaned by the collapse of consensus about the human good.

And that's exactly why the Aristotle-as-commons point matters so much. If the obstacle to formation-centered education is that pluralist societies lack a shared account of flourishing, then a thinker who is independently reachable from biology, economics, psychology, literature, political theory, and theology is not just intellectually interesting — he's the one plausible site where a new consensus could be rebuilt. Not because everyone will agree on the metaphysics (they won't, and that disagreement is itself formative), but because everyone can arrive at the same table with their own reasons for sitting down. A commons doesn't require unanimity about foundations; it requires a shared object of serious attention.

Which means the practical conclusion is almost embarrassingly concrete. Edumonia won't be restored by renaming education or waiting for institutions to recover their nerve. It gets rebuilt the way Aristotle said virtue itself is built — by practice, in small communities, around shared texts and shared tables, at the scale of friendship before the scale of the polis. The seminar, the fraternity, the parish study group, the household that reads together: these are not consolation prizes for a lost civilization. They are the actual mechanism. The polis was always downstream of the friendships.

You don't need the word to exist. You need the practice to exist somewhere — and that part has never required anyone's permission.