Integral Education and Waldorf Education
Integral Education has for some time been another term for Holistic or Whole-Child Education. Recently, however, there are more specific definitions emerging out of the work of Ken Wilbur, Steve McIntosh, Jean Gebser, Clara Graves and others that are taking on the term Integral.According to one current definition, an Integral education considers the many developmental lines in a human being —cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, artistic, moral, spiritual, and others... It also acknowledges the importance for an individual’s development and motivation of states of consciousness. Lastly, integral education considers types, people’s enduring tendencies and inclinations toward, for example, introversion or extraversion; agency or communion; and orderliness or spontaneity. Waldorf has been educating children from a whole-child, Integral perspective that takes into account and addresses all of these factors and more for nearly 90 years. The effectiveness of this education is visible in the tens of thousands of Waldorf graduates around the world.
For an In-Depth article on Waldorf Education within the context of Integral Education, from the International Journal of Children's Spirituality, click here(PDF Download, 222KB).
The author of this article, Jennifer Gidley, has done a lot of work correlating Rudolf Steiner's work with contemporary Integral Philosophy.