Integral

I regard integral education as the opposite of banking education.

The distinguishing features of integral education (as I understand it) include:

• An interdisciplinary and multicultural approach that fosters an awareness of how the multiple disciplines and perspectives that are studied integrate into a comprehensive whole.

• Emphasis on participatory and interactive modalities that foster active critical engagement, questioning, and critical reflection on the material, the world, and the self. 

• An approach that integrates multiple ways of learning and knowing – multiple facets of the human intelligence, such as the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and somatic.

• Emphasis on education as a path of transformation, in which knowledge is not merely memorized, but embodied.

• Empowerment of the individual student to increasingly take charge of hir own educational goals and the course of hir own education.

• Emphasis on the integration of individual and community, encouraging each student to see hirself as an integral part of multiple communities, on various scales, from the immediate community of the classroom to the global community.

• Emphasis on the conscious extension and extrapolation of personal transformation into the development of the student’s role as a positive transformational force within hir immediate and greater communities.