Why education, despite the expenditure of huge sums of money, is not delivering what it promises to deliver?

We are now so used to schools and colleges that we have forgotten that once we used to learn all on our own. Soon after birth we began learning all about what surrounded us and that being our home we learned all about its workings and got acclimatized to life within it. That is the NATURAL PROCESS OF LEARNING which functions by making sense of what we see, hear, feel, touch and interpret.

Then we are taken out of this familiar environment and are placed in a school where we are not told the whole story of knowledge we humans gathered so painstakingly and meticulously over centuries but the information is broken down into subjects, courses and lectures and we are examined to show that we have faithfully “memorized” it whether we understood it or not. That natural process of learning thus stops functioning and we end up getting confused.

On the other hand, if instead of sending us to schools we were exposed to how our world works and how our society runs, we would have continued learning uninterrupted.

This requires that we are exposed to or are shared with our accumulated knowledge in its totality in a systematic and integrated manner so we won’t be spending our lives groping and searching for it.

Thus our mission is to conserve and share humanity’s knowledge with the current and future generations of human kind.

This looks like a Herculean task but is made doable by a few facts we have not paid attention to and a few misconceptions we have unknowingly adhered to. For instance:

We have come to believe that we have learned so much over the years that it just cannot be taught unless broken down into manageable morsels and then fed as bits and pieces spread over time so to allow time for their digestion. In doing so we have not realized that this very act is disjoining otherwise cohesive knowledge and makes learning difficult if not impossible. Human knowledge has not evolved in a systematic manner but by hit and miss and as and when the need to know emerged. That is how Leeuwenhoek devised the microscope and the process of pasteurization by Pasteur when he was asked to look into why a friend’s wine was sometimes turning into vinegar instead of wine.     It is also important to realize that almost 200 years passed between Leeuwenhoek’s microscope and Pasteur’s pasteurization process. Thus if we view knowledge chronologically, we will find a lot of empty span of time when nothing worthwhile happened. Same can be said of other discoveries except that once the missing information becomes available, the span of time between discoveries shortens. This is evident how rapidly newer knowledge emerged once Pasteur got involved in seeing that just like wine got bad when wrong organisms got into it, perhaps the same way germs can also produce human and animal diseases which he showed by working with chicken cholera, a study also accidentally showed him how the weakened organisms can be used as vaccines enabling him to successfully produce a vaccine against anthrax. Knowledge thus grew by leaps and bounds but still systematically. What we have thus discovered is that if we pass on this accumulated knowledge in the same chronological order leaving nothing important out but freeing it from minutia and redundancies, we can shorten the learning process and also expand people’s common sense to function and live better.

 This is the basis of the Center for Integrative Learning where we sift sort and integrate the essential parts of our accumulated knowledge and then teach it in a systematic manner to our students in a story book format, in a hands-on fashion in a lab setting where such is needed as in teaching science.

The surprising result of this process of sifting and sorting was that the knowledge began to shrink becoming manageable. For instance, science got reduced to mere 150 concepts and skills basically to the concepts and skills scientists use to do science. Same sort of shrinking happened to the rest of our knowledge of arts and humanities and when their essence was merged with that of science, we ended up with a holistic collage of a curriculum easy to teach and learn with good retention and use in one’s daily life and work.

This thus is our philosophy and mission. The next step we want to take it is to revitalize teachers replacing their current way of compartmentalized thinking and functioning to integrative thinking and functioning. That we believe will make them more effective teachers at the same time cutting rising education costs.

With the world population now gone past the seven billion mark and growing, with our conventional system of fragmented teaching we will never be able to catch up unless we look into alternatives. Ours is a tried and true workable alternative. Try it for your children.

Contact us at: info@centerforintegrativelearning.org. Also follow see links on our website.