Tweet

Education As It Could Be: Integral Education

By Robert RosecloseAuthor: Robert Rose Name: Robert Rose
Site:
About: Dr.Rose has taught every grade in four major school districts in So.California. He has been successful using an eclectic and complex approach derived from solid research in the sciences. His web sites imaginativecurriculum.com and YouTube.com/icdrrose videos are filled with his books, workbooks, and videos that challenge the status quo. He has attempted to teach based on the Constitution and mutual respect and it has worked. For forty-five years in a yours, mine, and ours marriage, he enjoys a family that is demonstratively affectionate and loving. His latest book, Abuses of Power in Education; Challenging Practically Everything, Outskirts Press, 2008, is one of the main sources for the ideas he will be explaining in his blogs. He believes that students, teachers, parents, and administrators need legal power and protection to be able to have the freedom to do their job most effectively. No person or group should have unlimited power and that's why balance is as important as autonomy.See Authors Posts (19)

[Editors' note: Share your comments with the author and other readers in the Comments section below this article. ]

We don’t educate, we wire brains to accept authority unthinkingly. That is indoctrination where power comes from the top down.

In Integral Education (IE) students, teachers, parents, administrators share power. They all are learning how to use the powers they need to do their tasks and jobs to the best of their abilities.

Willow Dea’s book IGNITING BRILLIANCE: Integral Education for the 21st Century changes everything in education. These concepts are based on Ken Wilbur’s (philosopher) AQAL concept of five irreducible categories that underlie everything in the universe. In our normal education structure we tend to ignore great ideas, especially those that encourage the kind of deep thinking that integral education encourages. Thinking beings ask questions, not just answer them and the result is excitement, spontaneity, and the unknown that terrifies those in power.

Our policymakers state that our schools bring out the best in every student, but how can that happen using 19th Century thinking in prison-like classrooms where every thought and action is dictated by a teacher whose own behavior and thinking are dictated by those hundreds of miles from the classroom? It doesn’t.

What we have are massive efforts to homogenize unique individuals into passive, easily controlled robots. IE fights that with concepts that may seem familiar because schools use the words from the theory, but they don’t understand or practice the ideas. You can’t free students to be creative, thoughtful, and cooperative social beings when the teachers are themselves prisoners of outdated dogma and in a structure that severely penalized them for deviating from the standardized testing and stifling curriculum that is forced on all.

What does IE attempt to do? It offers an ethical classroom. It teaches by the teacher modeling it and her using classroom situations (taking the time) to teach compassion, caring, respect, empathy, and using discussions to develop quality relationships and community building.

It gives each student the chance to develop all his interests and his talents without neglecting what is called a basic education. It’s done with the realization of the complex internal and external environments that he lives within and how they affect his learning.

Multiple intelligences are not just a false promise, but the teachers take the time to talk with each student, test his intelligences, and use these to plan individual lessons. In each, every student is on a continuum that changes as he works on perfecting his strengths in each as well as learning new ways to improve on those he is weakest.

Creativity, like thinking, is talked about in teaching, but the closed structure of schools, the need to be in control, militates against creativity. Despite onerous controls, it sprouts out from the more courageous students, but for the vast majority, they can only be creative when the teacher (curriculum) allows it.

There is a lot of hyperbull about differential instruction. There has been improvement in the care of the more serious disabilities or learning problems, but for the majority no one takes the time to deal with the many subtle gradations of vision, hearing, movement, and other physical and emotional problems that exists and negatively affects learning.

Hands-on learning is instilled in student teachers, but when they get into teaching they find just how difficult it is to get organized, get all the necessary materials, and then teach it to students who are trained to be quiet and just do what they’re told. Even those teachers who are successful find that it isn’t worth the trouble, because they are still judged on alleged academic gains only (which may be modest) instead of all that the students learn about cooperation, healthy socialization, improvement of thinking and creativity.

There are many other factors that separate IE from normal teaching that are discussed in individual chapters written by teachers and professors who explain the whys and the hows of IE. Definitely worth the time to examine Willow’s book that can be used as the model of what 21st Century education will become.