Our Big Picture
Integral education and mainstream education have a lot in common.
They each recognize education’s purpose to include preparing students for a life well-lived for themselves and as contributing members of society.
In today’s global environment, this involves adopting ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’ perspectives.
Lifeworld
The personal, cultural and social knowledge and experience we show up with as sentient beings in our everyday lives
System
The instrumental mechanisms we use to get stuff done through the economy and the state using money and power
Integral education tends to privilege the lifeworld, while mainstream education is necessarily responsive to the system. Yet each works toward a shared horizon to achieve the following goals.
Increase Academic Quality
Leveling Up the Playing Field
Recognizing both lifeworld and system facilitates providing the knowledge and skills students need to succeed in the world, inclusive of qualitative and quantitative perspectives.
Academic quality can be prioritized and cultivated through student-teacher interactions. While quantitative measures appropriate to the learning environment can be incorporated.
Ensure Access & Opportunity
Every Student Counts
Increasing quality foregrounds the importance of ensuring access and opportunity for students to fulfill their educational and vocational aspirations. Yet these are often treated as a zero-sum game.
Providing access and opportunity to academics, student services and extracurricular activities does not need to diminish one relative to the other. All students can flourish fully and freely.
Build Institutional Capacity
Investments Have Value
Ensuring access and opportunity for all students is an investment that reminds us of the true value of education. It also reminds us that delivering on this value can be resource intensive.
Building the capacities of diverse institutional stakeholders allows for higher levels of value-added collaboration in the use of human, infrastructural, financial, and administrative resources.
Create a Sustainable Future
Sharing a Horizon
Building institutional capacity creates the basis for ongoing success and future potential. It also brings full circle the need to engage system imperatives adequate to lifeworld concerns.
To this end, mainstream education’s ability to differentiate and integrate these imperatives, and integral education’s attention to a lifeworld that sustains and restores us can complement one other.
