School cannot match the rewards, satisfaction, intensity, pleasure and experience that daily-life situations can offer in regard to learning. Integrated Learning promotes learning by choice, recognizing that interest and a desire to learn precede understanding. School is not the best environment to learn, as has been described in many articles that have appeared in earlier issues of this magazine. At school, a teacher typically has to address a great number of children simultaneously, while there are many distractions taking place in the classroom. School expects children to behave uniformly and they are disciplined accordingly, but learning is much more an individual than a social experience.
Some schools have more respect for the individual.
High student to teacher ratios make that schoolteachers resort to methods aimed more at keeping children quiet, than at learning. Typical exercises are colouring in, reading from the blackboard, dictation and mental arithmetic. Typical tests are filling in names of capital cities and countries on a blank world map and quoting years in which historical battles took place. Children have to learn all kinds of silly facts by heart. Learning all such facts by heart is of little use to children in their later life.