Education, in its deepest and highest sense, is a process or effort to realize and actualize one’s potential, to bring forth certain inherent but latent capacities, allowing one to grow and evolve into a higher expression of one’s being. Education is evolutionary in nature; to evolve is to educate oneself.
This evolutionary understanding of education is vastly different from the popular or mainstream view. Depending on how you define education—and if you keep this understanding at the center or as the starting point—everything you do in education or with children becomes a means toward a specific end. What would this end be? What do you place at the center or as the starting point? What you consider central to your educational efforts will guide your purpose, your policies, and everything you do in the field of education.
Let us reflect on mainstream education. Most of the education provided in schools and through traditional schooling is utilitarian in its intent, purpose, and delivery. We aim to shape children into someone: an "accountant", an "engineer", a "doctor", "sportsperson," an "artist,"& and so on. Imagine a world filled with such professions and roles, all with certificates and qualifications. Everyone is "qualified," but qualified in what sense? With what level of consciousness? How much mastery is reflected in their work? More importantly, how much self-mastery is evident? As long as a “lawyer” or an “engineer” is the result of a conscious choice, guided by their svabhava (sva-self, bhava-bhavati) self becoming, it should be fine. After all, education should bring to life our svabhava, our potentialities, innate tendencies, and inclinations. Education directed toward self-mastery—mastery of oneself, the world, and the forces that govern us—is the foundation upon which mastery in the outer world is built. As the saying goes,“Svarat, samrat bhavati” (He who is self-mastered becomes a master of the world).
Life cannot simply be about earning money, raising a family, and then earning more money to secure the family, continuing in an endless cycle. There is more to life, more within ourselves awaiting exploration. There are profound questions that, when pursued, can elevate one’s life to greater heights and depths. While understanding the first law of physics may be important, we are born with an innate drive to inquire about everything. Who am I? What am I? Why do I behave as I do? What shapes and shifts me? I live and experience life in certain ways—where do my feelings, memories, thoughts, fears, and so on, come from? Am I merely a product of my conditioning? My lineage, heredity, or culture? Am I just a bundle of psychological habits and conditioning?
Education in its profound sense must integrate inner life and the outer world, develop capacities to think, it must be integrating and interdisciplinary in its approach, it must nurture the insatiable curiosity that all of us are born with, it must develop capacities for courage, progress, perseverance, equality, gratitude, humility, and it must build the capacity to create. This, then, is the true scope of education. Education is life itself, and it must embrace all that life offers.
If education remains purely utilitarian, we will become mere "utilities," profoundly transactional in our lives.
Question: Do we want a world solely focused on utility?
Education is evolutionary, a movement towards fulfilment, towards the Divine. All we need to do is create and provide an enabling environment that allows the manifestation of consciousness in and through the body, mind, and life—a life led by the Psychic being.
This is truly integral education.