The integral approach to learning is practical and child-centred. It goes back to the basics of the human learning experience: human beings learn only what they want to learn, and they want to learn only what they really need to learn. This is the fundamental logic for learning, and the sequence deriving from it is thus obvious and deeply significant for those wishing to practice integral education.
Learning is entirely a function of necessity; one wants to learn only what one needs to learn. It is only when one is learning what one wants to learn that one is enjoying the process of learning, even if it is challenging or extremely exacting.
Necessity is internal and subjective; it cannot be imposed or prescribed. It is not necessary to have previous theoretical knowledge of what one needs, since needs are spontaneously generated by real life and its continuous and multi-natured demands. They do not need to be artificially created or prescribed.
Learning is an intensely personal affair; it is an inner dialogue one has with life in all its varied aspects: environmental, personal, interpersonal, social, and even ultimately cosmic. It is through the varied dynamics of this dialogue that one grows as a human being through lifelong exploration, discovery, and understanding.
Learning is lifelong and omni-dimensional. As learning is a dynamic dialogue with life and the cosmos, it is necessarily omni-dimensional, omni-directional, and integral. It cannot involve only one part or function of our being. If humans are as much physical as they are intellectual; as much emotional as they are physical; as much spiritual as they are emotional; as much social as they are individual—then it follows logically that learning will have to be integral: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, and individual.
This is the logic of learning: all real learning experiences of life flow with this logic, and this applies equally to adults as to children. So long as this internal logic of learning is respected and education systems are built on and around it, there is no problem. Problems arise when this logic is violated, distorted, or even dismissed as impractical or utopian and replaced with a logic alien to the essential and real processes of learning.
If education and educationists were to follow the deeper and more consistent logic of learning, then the real aim of schooling would be to make learning processes joyful and creative, to enable lifelong and life-enhancing learning to happen, and to integrate the process of education with the deeper and more internalized processes of learning.
But this does not usually happen. Education, by and large, does not follow the logic of learning—it follows the logic of teaching. To understand this dichotomy better, let us see how exactly the logic of teaching, or the pedagogical logic, operates.
Learning is a function of teaching and education; it is a highly disciplined act and demands well-organized and efficient structures to enable it to happen. The school is one such organized structure to enable learning.
Teaching derives from a perceived need to impart education in order to make the student socially, ethically, and professionally useful. This logic follows from two premises: first, the child, left to itself, is a cultural and moral savage and therefore needs to be educated; and second, the adult, being culturally and morally superior, is obliged to pass on its superior learning to the child so that the child too can be moulded in its own image. Such a logic therefore makes the inherent nature of teaching prescriptive and obligatory.
Learning is seen as a transference process from the superior adult to an inferior child. A transference process, by its nature, is didactic and does not easily lend itself to a dialogic process. In fact, its continued success depends on efficient hierarchies that reinforce the didactic process. Thus, children are told what to learn, teachers are told what to teach, and schools are told what to prescribe. This is the pedagogical hierarchy.
Didactic-transference processes require enabling structures to support them. These include the classical classroom setting, the syllabus or prescribed program, and the textbook (including modern electronic variations), which serves as the principal instrument for transacting the prescribed program.
Over time, teaching becomes inseparable from its structures. This mindset perceives the teaching-learning process as impossible outside of schools, teachers, prescribed programs, and textbooks. This is the pedagogical mindset.
The school becomes predominant, and real-life learning is subsumed. Any learning that occurs outside the school and independent of it is dismissed as peripheral or insignificant.
As learning gets increasingly pedagogised, the learner herself becomes marginalized. Personal processes of learning are subsumed in pedagogy, and delivering results in pedagogical terms takes precedence over genuine content, processes, and dynamics of learning.
This dichotomy between the logic of learning and the logic of teaching renders most systems of education—particularly school education—ultimately futile. It leads to the classical symptom of the learning crisis: children are simply not interested in learning.
As already indicated, the problem here is misstated because most people, even qualified teachers, fail to distinguish between learning and studying. This is primarily because most practicing teachers as well as parents operate out of the pedagogical mindset. To understand the integral process, we must first understand the pedagogical mindset and its implications for education.
The pedagogical mindset assumes that learning and studying are similar, if not the same—that children learn through study. This assumption extends from the adult’s experience of learning through study. The adult learns primarily through studying. If the adult mind wishes to learn about stars or human behaviour, it will study astronomy or psychology; it will study the stars and space, or other humans, to come to knowledge. This, in fact, constitutes adult epistemology.
The essential adult epistemology consists of three distinct, though interacting, components: the knower, the object of knowledge, and the process of knowledge itself. This implies that the knower—the student—is essentially separated from the object of knowledge, whether stars, a flower, or another person. This separation implies an objectification: the subject and the object, the knower and the known. This radical duality dominates human consciousness in all its aspects and domains. As long as knowing maintains this duality, learning will remain a function of study. One can only study something external to oneself.
The integral model, however, goes beyond this duality. It exceeds the fragmented epistemology of the knower and the known and points to a more synthetic epistemology where the knower identifies with the object of knowledge and becomes one with it. If dualistic epistemology culminates in intellectual or sensory constructs of the object, then synthetic epistemology culminates in knowledge by identity—an internalized knowing of the object as it is, a real knowledge validated by personal experience.
This is the second, the epistemological basis of integral education: that learning is a synthetic and unitive experience. It does not culminate in duality of perception but in unity; not in constructs, but in true knowledge and inner understanding, validated by lived experience.
Integral education posits this synthetic epistemology but does not reject dualistic epistemology. It seeks to combine both: knowledge by identity alongside knowledge by study and construct. Only when both are integrated can learning be effective and complete.
The difference between learning and studying is therefore the difference in epistemologies—in ways of primary cognition. Most children love learning and are averse to studying because, at young ages, they are more open to identification. They exist at a pre-intellectual and intuitive level and can synthesise experience more efficiently than they can analyse it. As innate intuitive capacities weaken and intellectual-sensory capacities grow stronger (due to cultural biases), the ability to identify and synthesise diminishes in proportion to the strengthening of intellectual analysis.
In an integral education context, however, the objective is to develop intuition and the capacity to synthesise as much as to develop intellect and the capacity to analyse. One must balance the other. When intellect is given overriding importance and intuition, emotions, and other aspects are neglected, education creates imbalance and disharmony in both the individual and society.
Once the teacher is well-grounded in the psychology and practices of integral learning, well-grounded in his own being, and working as much towards his own integral change as towards becoming an effective integral teacher, he is ready to consciously begin the creation of an integral school. He may do this with like-minded individuals or initiate the process on his own, depending on his circumstances and inner preparedness for the Work.