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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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 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.