Ostensibly Professor Jaeger's is primarily an account of the paideia that formed the Greek city-states, an ideal of education which served to constitute them and which they bequeathed to the Western world.  Arguably it was this projection into the past, of ideals which Jaeger extracted from the literary history of Greece, which made life meaningful, if not bearable for him.

My conclusion, admittedly tentative, is that I should interpret Jaeger's Paideia to be an accomplished performance on the academic stage. As such it does tell something about ancient Greece, but it tells as much or more, about the present, specifically about our academic institutions, but what it reveals most conclusively is the mind of its author.

From my father I learned that the Prussian army instilled discipline (paideia?) into its recruits by requiring them to scrub a bathroom floor with a toothbrush. That is the spiritual ambience into which Jaeger introduced his concept of paideia as a new gospel. I discern in his writing the spirit of Iphigenie who pleads with the Olympian gods:

O daß in meinem Busen nicht zuletzt
Ein Widerwillen keime! Der Titanen,
Der alten Götter tiefer Haß auf euch,
Olympier, nicht auch die zarte Brust
Mit Geierklauen fasse! Rettet mich
Und rettet euer Bild in meiner Seele!
       Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, Akt 4; Szene 5

I interpret his invention of Paideia as Jaeger's desperate plea that Humanism be saved - from the demons with which the world in which he lived was infested.  I now think of Werner Jaeger as a latter day Hermes who shuttles between Olympus and Unter den Linden, between Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität and Harvard Square to disseminate the message of Paideia as Kultur to all men of good will.  To this end he assumed the mantle of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf as arbiter of linguistic truth to redefine Paideia and change its meaning from Strafe to Bildung. It was this sleight of language which made him one of the most prominent classical scholars of the 20th century.

I surmise that Jaeger's re-interpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics which catapulted him from Lobberich to the most prestigious professorship of the Classics in Germany, was likewise an hermeneutic accomplishment, specifically one that finally gave the remains of Aristotle, which the Scholastics had picked clean of meaning, a dignified burial.  This however is an interpretation with which I should have waited until I have done my homework.