ABSTRACT
As the concept of a special kind of purposive activity, the concept of 'adult education' cannot be fully elucidated until we have established the exact nature of the purposes which the concept logically enshrines. Now, we have already argued that an educational activity is one which fosters the highest development of individuals as persons, and that the development of persons essentially consists in the enlargement of awareness. A person, we have claimed, is essentially a centre of awareness, a being who perceives, feels, remembers, imagines, thinks, judges, desires, and chooses, and who is in the measure that he is intensely experiencing and aware of what is going on around him and within him. To foster the development of the adult as a person, then, to educate him, is to extend the scope and enrich the quality of his awareness, and when we deem an activity to be educational in character, we do so by virtue of its pursuit and achievement of this governing purpose. Our first task, therefore, must be to establish more precisely what is involved in 'the enlargement of awareness', for until we have done this our claim that adult education consists essentially in the enlargement of the adult's awareness may well strike the reader as somewhat vague and insubstantial, and indeed in some ways as rather implausible.
