Being and becoming

The child from birth to age three can be seen as a spiritual embryo. It can seem like the infant, at birth, is nothing, without pre-established psychic qualities, motionless and empty. Yet inside the infant are the immense potentialities to determine her/his development, a global power striving for purposeful activity and reasoning, and containing the creative essence of humanity.

Real knowledge is already hidden inside the child. Knowledge is something humans are born with. But there is an educational paradox of being and becoming. We cannot search for knowledge unless we know what we are looking for. At the same time, if we already had the knowledge, we would not have to look for it.

With this view, Integral Education is a problem-posing education, that responds to the essence of consciousness which is intentionality. Consciousness is consciousness of consciousness. Such an education is based on free progress, the practice of freedom in its truest sense, which starts with the removing hierarchies of authority and instead working through communication, observation and reflection.

In the educational process we see that children and parents/facilitators are cognitive actors. Through dialogue new terms representing the roles and relationship emerge: teacher-student and student-teacher, in a joint process through which both parties grow. In this process no one teaches another, yet no one is self taught, and people learn from each other and are mediated by the world around them. Children are critical co-investigators, who are in dialogue with their facilitators/parents.

The parents/facilitators can propose opportunities for learning or material to the child for their consideration, and together with the child create the conditions under which true knowledge can come to the forefront. Here education strives for the emergence of consciousness and a critical intervention with reality. Therefore there is only one thing that the learner has to learn: to remember that she/he already is in possession of the required knowledge. A movement of research where all teaching is revealing and all becoming is an unfolding.

Based on this view of the individual’s autonomy, we se that Integral Education is only possible if the child is free and self-active. At the same time, in order for the individual to become free and self-active, an education to develop one’s self-awareness seems to be necessary. Through this understanding, parents/facilitators need to recognize and treat children as if they are already free (reflective, capable, trustworthy) in order to reach the ability to grow and act.

Education is that which supports an individual to come into being.

The world is a reality in process, in transformation. It is the power of perceiving critically how we exist in this world that parents/facilitators and children simultaneously can reflect upon themselves and the world, to bring authentic forms of thought and action. In this way both children and parents/facilitators are beings in the process of becoming. Aware of their incompletion and where the point of departure is always here and now, seeing how to work towards reaching each one reaching her/his full potential in the present. Aurogames are designed with this principle - nothing can be taught.