ABSTRACT
As the development of persons in their personhood, we have claimed, education essentially sets out to build up the educand's being as a conscious self by deepening and extending his awareness of reality in all its fundamental forms. To grow in awareness, we have emphasized, is to enter into closer touch with reality, to encounter and become present to what is real and to dis-cover its objective properties, structures, and meanings. In putting the matter like this, however, we may perhaps have run the risk of giving a somewhat unbalanced picture. If we describe a man's growth in awareness entirely in terms of the richer patterns of reality to which he becomes present, entirely in terms of the increasing range, complexity, and worth of the objects of his awareness, this may do justice to the 'intentionality' of our awareness, its character as pointing-to and yielding-itself-up-to what lies outside and beyond itself, but it may run the risk of doing less than justice to the native agency of the awareness which does the pointing and the yielding, its character as a unique force surging up and initiating the manifold dis-coverings of the objective reality to which it makes itself present. There is a subjective as well as an objective pole to the consciousness-object axis. Certainly, the enlargement of our awareness is wholly asserted in the greater scope and significance of the objects which our awareness opens up and illuminates. When I see a house, the extent and limits of my seeing are wholly defined by whatever actual features of the house my seeing discloses. Nevertheless, while there is no seeing apart from the objects seen, my seeing is always distinct from the objects seen, and stands in need of distinct characterization. And in general, my awareness—as an activity distinct from the objects to which it is directed—can be, ougt to be,and in fact commonly is characterized in terms altogether different from those we use in characterizing the objects of awareness (except, of course, when these objects are themselves acts or states of awareness, my own or another's). My awareness of this house is a seeing of its shuttered windows, a noticing of its dilapidated condition, a remembering of its late owner, a deploring of its standing empty: my awareness is simultaneously or successively all of these and many other activities which combine to initiate the appearance of this house as an object of my awareness. To exercise one's powers of awareness (one's 'mental powers' in the widest sense, one's distinctive powers as a conscious being) is to exercise one's powers of sensing, focusing, discriminating, judging, interpreting, imagining, anticipating, recalling, evaluating, admiring, loving, and a thousand other distinctive powers of perception, thought, and feeling which can only be exercised in relation to the objects that solicit them, but which can nevertheless be distinguished from these and assessed as realities in their own right.
