ABSTRACT
The question of education, fundamentally, is one of what it means to lead life, rather than merely live it. In this chapter I argue that what makes the difference between leading life and living it is attention. Once again following Dewey, I found the primacy of attention in the principle of habit, defined by the inclusion of doing within undergoing, and exemplified in the ordinary practice of walking. In walking along together, we both attend and respond to one another and to the terrain: that is, we correspond. This correspondence entails both care, in bringing others into presence, and longing, in the alignment of care with memory and imagination. Comparing approaches to attention in educational philosophy and ecological psychology, I show that attention has two phases: of submission, and of practical mastery. Bringing the two phases together, I advance a weak sense of education which exposes us to what is there rather than offering the security of established knowledge.
