According to Dr Ramon Gallegos Nava:

In a multilevel vision of education we begin to integrate different pedagogies into a global map. This allows us to see with clarity the fact that education has at least five levels and that these rest in a deep level of awareness and experience that is kosmic or spiritual and which is fundamental to all genuine education. 

The spiritual level is inclusive of the individual, community, social and environmental levels, but the spiritual level itself is not included in the four lower levels of awareness and experience. For this reason the holistic educator always keeps the spiritual level in mind when working at any other level. This allows one to have a panoramic integral vision of education that is inclusive of many complementary pedagogies.

Conventional education does not have this multilevel vision. Its vision is of a flat territory of a single level in which many alternative pedagogies can be seen as antagonistic towards one another because there is no inclusive vision.

Almost all pedagogical theory is focused at the levels of the individual, the community and the society. The other two levels of awareness and experience corresponding to the planet and the kosmos have little presence in educational literature.  Only recently has the planetary level received much attention through ecoliteracy and environmental education and only recently has the kosmic level of spirituality in education become the heart of study for holistic educators who have begun to reconstruct the educational kosmos. 

In looking at any lower level with respect to an upper level it is necessary to remember that we are speaking of an expansion of awareness and experience.  One is not to discard pedagogy in the lower levels but to locate each pedagogy in its appropriate place.

Often different pedagogical theories or theories of learning focus on only one or two levels. Those theories that are focused on the first level generate a serious educational reductionism. That is to say, they reduce the five levels to a single one losing an integral vision.  Critical pedagogical thought is centered mainly at the social level as it attempts to understand ideological and cultural problems but it is inadequate to explain planetary, global and environmental problems, and completely inadequate to understand the kosmic level of spirituality.  When critical pedagogy at the social level wants to judge the validity of spiritual experience it commits a serious category error since these are different levels of awareness and experience.

A multidimensional vision allows us to begin to integrate components at each level and to extend a unidimensional view of education and therefore extend education beyond the mechanist or conventional. Of the six educative dimensions the cognitive has generally been a primary focus to the degree that all learning is basically considered to be a cognitive process and the educational task almost exclusively an academic development of 1ogic/mathematical abilities.  This exclusively unidimensional cognitive view has its origin in the philosophy of modernity and its corresponding scientific-industrialist culture where reason is the faculty par excellence in the human being.  This emphasises factory and scientific views of the human capacity to understand the world and has led to the design of conventional educational systems that have implied, conscious or unconsciously, that the student is like a robot that must assimilate information. 

An exclusively cognitive vision of learning is reductionistic and ignores fundamental dimensions that to a large extent determine the quality of the educative process. Education and learning cannot be reduced to purely cognitive processes because the human being much more than a cognitive process - much more than an instrument of rationality.  Education cannot be reduced to academic memorizing and intellectual, rational, linguistic, linear and materialistic training. Education is a much greater experience than all that - it is related to the total awareness and experience of the child or the student. 

When in a multidimensional vision we include the emotional, social, aesthetic, physical and spiritual we obtain a more integral understanding of learning.  Already Daniel Goleman has indicated the importance of the emotional dimension in education emphasizing that it is a better indicator of success in life than academic abilities, and Herbert Read has demonstrated the centrality of the aesthetic dimension in all educative processes, especially in children. 

We need to locate and to limit each pedagogy or theory of learning in its correct place in this multidimensional vision.  For example, Piaget was a great investigator of the developmental stages of intelligence, but his work does not have to be interpreted across all dimensions since his study was limited to the cognitive dimension of learning and his concept of intelligence was basically in the logical-mathematical area.

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