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 it be 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, even ultimately cosmic; and it is through the varied dynamics of this dialogue that one grows as a human being through lifelong exploration, discovery and understanding.
- As learning is a lifelong, 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 beings. 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 omni-dimensional and 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 the adult as to the child. 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 or 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 the 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, 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 better this dichotomy, let us see how exactly the logic of teaching, or the pedagogical logic, operates:
- Learning is a function of teaching and of 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 commonly perceived need to impart education in order to make the student socially, ethically and professionally useful. This logic follows from two premises: one, the child, left to itself, is a cultural and moral savage and therefore needs to be educated; and two, 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.
- Following from the same logic, learning is perceived to be a transference process from the superior adult to a necessarily inferior child. A transference process, by its very nature, is didactic and does not lend itself too easily to a dialogic process. In fact, its continued success comes to depend on certain efficient hierarchies that reinforce and sustain the didactic process. So we have children being told what to learn; and we have teachers being told what to teach; and we have schools being told what to prescribe. We shall call this the pedagogical hierarchy.
- Didactic-transference processes are also dependent on certain external structures that support and enable transference processes to happen efficiently. These supporting-enabling structures are the classical classroom setting, the syllabus (or the prescribed program for learning) and the text book (with its present-day electronic variations) as the principal instrument for transacting the prescribed program.
- As the teaching process gets more and more identified with its enabling structures, it leads to a mindset that perceives and believes the teaching- learning process to be inseparable from its enabling structures. This leads to the conclusion that one cannot learn, and one cannot be taught, outside the structure. This is the pedagogical mindset.
- In the pedagogical mindset, the school becomes predominant in the whole process and an actual, real-life learning is subsumed and relegated to an extent where any learning that occurs outside the school and independent of it, is dismissed as peripheral learning and not of much practical significance.
- As learning gets increasingly pedagogised—that is, gets increasingly identified with teaching and teaching-structures like schools, teachers, prescribed programs and text books, the learner herself gets correspondingly marginalized and reduced in importance. The learner’s personal processes are subsumed in the pedagogy, and delivering results in pedagogical terms takes logical precedence over the content, processes and dynamics of learning.
This dichotomy between the logic of learning and the logic of teaching renders most systems of education, at least school education, ultimately futile and leads to the classical symptom of the learning crisis: children are just 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 and that is primarily due to the fact that most practicing teachers as well as parents are themselves operating out of the pedagogical mindset. To come to an understanding of the integral process, we need to thoroughly understand the pedagogical mindset and its implications for education.
The pedagogical mindset assumes that learning and studying are similar, if not the same thing; that children learn through study. This is, of course, an extension of the adult experience of learning through studying. The adult learns primarily through studying. If the adult mind wishes to learn about stars, or human behavior, 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 knower, the student, is essentially separated from the object of knowledge—whether stars, a flower or another person; this will imply an essential objectification, a positing of the subject and the object, the knower and the known. This is the radical duality that dominates human consciousness in all its aspects and domains. As long as the process of knowing posits and maintains the duality of the knower and the known, so long will learning be a function of study. One must bear in mind that you can only study something that is outside of yourself. The integral model subsumes the pedagogical and goes beyond: it exceeds the fragmented epistemology of the knower and the known and points to a more synthetic epistemology where the knower does not stand apart from the object of knowledge but identifies with it, becomes one with it. If the dualistic epistemology of the knower studying the object of knowledge from the outside culminates in an essentially intellectual or sensory construct of the object of knowledge, then the synthetic epistemology where the knower identifies with the object of knowledge would culminate in a knowledge by identity, an internalized knowing of the object as it is, and the knowledge so gained would be a real knowledge and not an intellectual or sensory construct.
This is the second, the epistemological, basis of integral education: that learning is a synthetic and unitive experience, not culminating in duality of perception and knowledge but in unity; not substituting knowledge of a thing by an intellectual or sensory construct, but exceeding constructs to arrive at a true knowledge and inner understanding, validated by personal experience.
Integral education posits the synthetic epistemology but does not reject the dualistic epistemology either. It seeks to combine the elements of both. Knowledge by identity is one aspect; intellectual study and knowledge by construct is another; the experience of learning will have to integrate both to be entirely 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 very young ages, they are more open to identification, they exist at a pre-intellectual and strongly intuitive level and can synthesise experience more efficiently than analyse. As the innate intuitive capacities degenerate and the intellectual-sensory capacities get stronger—entirely because of cultural biases—the ability to identify and synthesise diminishes in proportion to the strengthening of the intellectual ability to study.
In an integral education context, however, the objective is to develop the intuition and the capacity to synthesise as much as to develop the intellect and the capacity to analyse. One will need to balance the other. It is when the intellect is given an overriding importance in the educational process, and the intuitive, the emotional and other aspects are almost completely neglected or relegated, that education leads to imbalance and disharmony in the individual and in society.
Once the teacher is well-grounded in the psychology and practices of integral learning, is well-grounded in his own being, is working as much towards his own integral change as towards becoming an effective integral teacher, is living increasingly in the light of the psychic in him, he is ready to start consciously working towards the creation of an integral school. He would do this either with a group of like-minded individuals or would seek to initiate the whole process on his own, depending on where he is, and in what inner condition of preparedness for the Work he is in.
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