The complete development of a child requires education which builds all parts of their being including physical capabilities together with intellectual growth and emotional maturity and social skills. According to Mahatma Gandhi's wise observation education enables total growth of the body mind and heart of individuals. Multiple obstacles stand in the way of developing a students’ intellectual and social abilities along with individual development. In today’s global collaboration of education, when a student is exposed to a multi-ethnic academic condition, his/her socio-emotional perceptions receive significant impacts and may lead to his transformation. Quality motivation and strategic learning environments can guide such students toward his participation, desirable transformative pathways and prospective academic results.

Future success path development by students depends heavily on the interdependent relationship of social emotional and spiritual elements (How et al., 2024). The components deeply affect human development but their outcomes differ per person because of their personal experiences and their cultural background along with their socio-economic standing (Zhihao & Kee, 2024). Student motivation together with academic strategies, particularly when the learners of diverse ethnic groups come together and interact in a single academic space need a thorough check, evaluation and analysis so that education system can incorporate more inclusivity and scalability as per the current global academic agenda (Chaudhary, Deshpande, & Khandelwal, 2024).

A research analysis based on inductive methods uses descriptive statistics to study current survey data collected from two educational institutions: Gurukul and Modern Private Schools in Delhi. This research investigates whether social intelligence learning should become essential for Indian students studying in primary and secondary schools since India has a multi-ethnic social structure. Students' social intelligence enables their development of critical teamwork abilities together with cultural understanding and emotional resistance and moral strength leading to academic and life success.

The study aims to support the global agenda of inclusive education and attempts to emphasize on strategic socio-emotional learning policies to be incorporated in the modern as well as traditional schools of India. To justify this perspective, the study is planned and developed as an inductive, exploratory and descriptive analysis on the basis of real time quantitative data collected from two distinct schools of India located in Delhi region –Modern Schools and Gurukul Schools. To obtain results that validates the study objectives, the study utilizes statistical computation, particularly to get descriptive and variational relationship results. Objectives that the study aims to fulfill are:

1. To explore and identify the status and outcomes of socio-emotional learning that reflects inclusion and participation of multi-ethnic students in Modern and Gurukul school students
2. To analyse the significance and necessities of  socio-emotional learning in terms of building up inclusive school educational system that permits multi-ethnic background in Modern and Gurukul schools
3. To examine the importance and need of connecting spiritual intelligence with socio-emotional intelligence in terms of building up inclusive educational system permitting access and scope to students of multi-ethnic background in Modern and Gurukul schools
4. To justify the role and prospects of socio-emotional learning in terms of the students’ individual, social, moral and intellectual growth particularly in multi-ethnic school education system

The research is structured into sections that are discussed in sequence as the steps of study motivation till its analysis and results. Accordingly, the study is organized as: Background Study – our groundwork that helped in gathering the beginning materials and facts to conceive our study; Related Works – that enhanced our motivation and gave us the based to conceptualize our study analysis and areas of investigation; Methods and Tools of the study, Results, Analysis and Discussion of Investigation and lastly, the study Conclusion and Recommendation of future works.

The article will start with the first section, which is Related Works, which can be found below.

To begin with, we’ve explored relevant scholarly articles that are worked on incorporating socio-economic theories and learning approaches in academic systems with multi-ethnic learners. We have gathered these documents from reputable online public and open-source academic repositories, including Scopus, Jstor, ResearchGate, Wiley, and others. They were chosen based on their relevancy, practical application, and alignment with our theme and aims. The review is pre-processed and improved in quality by removing irrelevant, duplicate, merely theoretical, or old material published more than 15 years ago.

Daniel Goleman’s (1995) research, the founding work on socio-emotional intelligence (SEI) and awareness has mentioned emotional intelligence (EI) as, “It is a self-awareness and regulation.” Furthermore, Radha Kamal Mukerjee (1930) identified social intelligence (SI) as a product of cultural values through scholarly sources from Scopus and JSTOR (Mukerjee, 1930). The researchers at Emmons, Vaughan and Wolman (Vaughan, 2002; Wolman, 2001) established spiritual intelligence (SpI) as an endeavor for discovering profound existential meaning. The findings from Ebrahimi Koohbanani and Abdullah indicate that emotional intelligence strengthens both social and spiritual connections (Koohbanani et al., 2013).

The insights of both Prakash (2023) and Mishra & Tripathi (2025) (Prakash, 2023; Mishra & Tripathi, 2025) confirm that Indian educational institutions should unite SEI and SI because doing so assists students with developing ethical knowledge probes as well as social adaptation abilities and comprehensive educational growth. The research by Srivastava and Sinha (2023) proves that teacher effectiveness connects to SI by showing its necessary role in both classroom management systems and relational skills. The inclusion of SEI and SI in educational curricula in India leads to enhanced emotional resilience as well as ethical development and social unity according to these research outcomes.

Gayathri and Meenakshi (2013) emphasized the importance of emotional intelligence in various domains, but its cross-cultural significance remains unexamined. This paper examines Mayer and Salovey's 'ability model' in the context of Indian culture, comparing it to Lord Krishna's 'Sthithapragnya' in the Bhagavad-Gita. Bhojani et al. (2019) found that racial-ethnic minority students are more susceptible to peer victimization and school bullying, which can negatively impact academic motivation. Emotional intelligence, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are important factors in stress management and academic achievement. Sundaramoorthy et al. (2024) studied the impact of emotional intelligence on cross-cultural adaptation in Indian students, revealing that self-emotional appraisal and others' emotional evaluation significantly affect expatriate adjustment. Rural students exhibited greater cross-cultural adaption than urban ones. 

Multiple studies show that India’s multi-ethnic schools remain deficient in socio-emotional intelligence (SEI) research integration efforts. Research shows that SEI supports both resilience and inclusivity but Indian education systems need organized policies to establish its practical execution. Literature about SEI exists mostly as conceptual studies because current research lacks adequate experimental investigations of practical SEI implementations. Research has not sufficiently established the connection between SEI and spiritual intelligence (SI) which prevents better understanding of their capacity to develop cultural sensitivity and ethical learning. The education system requires this essential improvement to develop into better inclusion and social awareness.

Study Problem and Research Motivation

The Indian educational system requires an evidence-based inductive-exploratory study of SEI learning in multi-ethnic schools because existing structures are sparse and educational institutions do not understand or incorporate SEI properly. Global studies demonstrate SEI provides students with resilience as well as inclusive opportunities but Indian educational settings require both policy improvements and teacher instruction programs to integrate it effectively. Bringing together SEI with spiritual intelligence (SI) represents an underdeveloped area of research despite its power to improve ethical thinking alongside emotional strength and social skills (UNESCO, 2024). The research evaluates both student understanding and the power of SEI across different ethnic learning environments to determine its adoption barriers within educational practice. The research will connect existing gaps to offer analytical understanding about creating inclusive classrooms which support cultural group collaboration and enhance student engagement and knowledge sharing for building an equitable education framework.

Study Conceptualization: The study that considers it necessary to explore, identify and assess the status, level and prospects of inclusive educational system in India permitting fair scope to students from multi-ethnic thus is planned to extract and analyse real time data collected from recognized school educational system of India. The core motivational areas that are anticipated to boost inclusion of multi-ethnic students is incorporation of socio-emotional intelligence learning model. Gaining insight of the existing researches, it is realized that scholars have theoretically justified the role of inclusive socio-emotional intelligence model to boost access and participation of multi-ethnic students in modern educational system. At the same time, responding to the recent demand of global collaborative educational system, inclusive spiritual intelligence learning is equally important and necessary to grow a balanced individual, social, moral and intellectual intelligence among the multi-ethnic students. Thus, the study is conceptualized as an exploratory and descriptive analysis that examines the outcome of students' socio-emotional intelligence learning as well as spiritual intelligence learning in contemporary Private Modern schools that in turn reflect inclusion and participation of multi-ethnic students. Additionally, the research has conducted similar inspection on the students' learning outcome data collected from Traditional Gurukul Schools to explicitly identify and assess the existing variations of teaching patterns and their outcome in the inclusion of multi-ethnic students in India's active academic system. The outcome analysis is planned in the form of inductive analysis to emphasize and support for inclusive educational system allowing access and fair participation of multi-ethnic students in India's academic system. The study thus, is developed to fill the existing gap of substantial evidence-based justification on the need and role of socio-emotional intelligence learning that promotes inclusive education for multi-ethnic students and help in developing their balanced individual, social, moral and intellectual intelligence.     

Formulation of Study Hypotheses:

The study hypotheses are as follows:

H1: Socio-Emotional intelligence learning status and outcome reflects inclusion and participation of multi-ethnic students of Modern and Gurukul schools of Delhi

H2: Socio-Emotional intelligence is connected with spiritual intelligence and impact on multi-ethnic students’ individual, social, moral and intellectual growth in Modern and Gurukul schools of Delhi

H3: Socio-Emotional intelligence learning is necessary to be incorporated in Modern and Gurukul schools as a strategic model to permit fair inclusion and participation of multi-ethnic students’

Sampling and Data Collection Scheme: As said earlier, the study is conducted on real time data to obtain authentic and considerable results. Accordingly, two distinct school level academic institutes are chosen from the region of Delhi – Private Modern schools and Traditional Gurukul schools. The reason of such selection is to provide a clear and visible evidence of variation, level and outcome of socio-emotional learning that reflect inclusion, participation and motivation to multi-ethnic students. A sample of n = 600 students of secondary classes are collected by using purposive sampling method. The method is chosen to systematically group the sample in terms of gender demography. The study, within its scope and capacity considers gender demography as a significant factor to analyse variations and level of students' learning. 10 schools of each chosen type (Modern and Gurukul) is picked and 30 students (combining girls and boys students) are interviewed. Details of the population sampling is given below:

Table 1: Data Collection Details of Students from Private Modern and Traditional Gurukul Schools

A structured questionnaire based quantitative survey is done to collect necessary information from the chosen population sample. The questionnaire is set with three separate question sections on Social, Emotional and Spiritual intelligence learning. Close end answering options is placed based on Likert scale with a range of 5 (to score from STRONGLY AGREE to STRONGLY DISAGREE). Questionnaire questions are set taking three recognized intelligence scales, namely:

• Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) by Anukool Hyde, Pethi and Upinder Dhar (2002).
• Spiritual Intelligence Scale (SIS) by Dr K. S Mishra (2014)
• Social Intelligence Scale (SIS) by Dr. Bindhu Joseph & Dr. Prem Prabha Singh (2015)

The above-mentioned scales include significant socio-emotional and spiritual intelligence learning dimensions with proven inter connectivity and theoretical validation on motivating ethical individuality.

In terms of their impacts among the multi-ethnic students reflecting their participation and growth of individual, social, moral and intellectual intelligence, these learning dimensions are are given below:

Table 2: Learning Dimensions of Social, Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence based on their impact of multi-ethnic students' inclusion, participation and learning

In this research, the motivation level is practically analysed to interpret inclusion and participation level of multi-ethnic students. From these outcomes, their individual, social, moral and intellectual intelligence learning level is assessed and scored in terms of the current global demand of inclusive and collaborative society.

Methods and Tools: The research analysis is done by using statistical tools applied on the primary data that are collected from the responses of the respondents.

• Standard descriptive tools, such as mean, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, are used to locate and analyse the overall learning level and variation amongst the students (meant to interpret the participation and inclusion of multi-ethnic students in school learning system of India)
• Regression analysis and factor analysis are done to determine and analyse the inter-connectivity between socio-emotional and spiritual learning and their collective impact on multi-ethnic students (meant to interpret the pattern and level of development of individual, social, moral and intellectual intelligence) 

Analyses of this study are done in two parts. First, descriptive statistical analysis and then relationship identification and assessment. Descriptive statistical analyses findings provide the overall status and level of socio-emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence learning status and level of the students of Modern Private and Traditional Gurukul schools. Relationship identification and assessment analyses are specifically done to obtain the impact connectivity between socio-emotional intelligence learning and collective impact of social, emotional, spiritual intelligence learning on students. Both overall relationship assessment and relationships of social, emotional, spiritual learning based on the inclusion, participation and reflection of growth of individual, social, moral and intellectual intelligence level among the multi-ethnic students are computed to gather clear and considerable understanding.

1. Descriptive Statistical Analysis Results

The table below presents the overall statistical social, emotional and spiritual intelligence learning score of school students (boys and girls) in Private Modern and Gurukul schools.

Table 3: Overall Statistical Descriptive Analysis on the Learning Outcome of Social, Emotional and Spiritual Learning among boys and girls in schools

Centering the focus on the outcome of the learning dimensions (Social, Emotional, Spiritual Intelligence learning) that impact on the multi-ethnic students and lead to the growth of individual, social, moral and intellectual intelligence learning level, the analysis results are given below:

Table 4: Outcome of Learning the Social, Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence Dimensions that impact of multi-ethnic students

The results show that Indian Private Modern and Gurukul educational institutions maintain balanced social emotional and spiritual learning approaches. Table 3 reveals balanced Social, Emotional, and Spiritual Intelligence learning in India’s Private Modern and Gurukul schools, with boys scoring higher in social intelligence (3.75) and girls in spiritual intelligence (3.70). Multi-ethnic inclusive practices (Table 4) strengthen through leadership (3.77) as well as respects (3.79) and moral attributes (3.76) yet experience weakness in innovation (3.41) and critical thinking (3.71). To produce growth oriented inclusive educational system scoping for multi-ethnic students' inclusion, Private schools require upgraded moral-spiritual teaching methods alongside Gurukuls to enhance their modern progressive educational approaches.

1. Relationship Identification and Assessment Results

Although it is established theoretically that spiritual awareness, liberalism and learning inclusion motivates multi-ethnic inclusion, participation and scope of collaboration in diverse ethnic communities, there is lack of validation on determining the level of connectivity between socio-emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence learning and their collective impacts on students. To add resources in this lacking area, exploratory factor analysis is done to locate the areas where socio-emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence learning are interconnected and impact on students' inclusion and participation. The results are given below:

Table 5: Exploratory Factor Analysis on interconnectivity between school level Socio-Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence Learning

Exploratory Factor Analysis (Table 5) reveals strong interconnections between Social-Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence in school academics. Combined with the impact score as given in Table 2, factor analysis shows that social respect (0.396), morality (0.390), and leadership (0.404) are among the leading learning dimensions that influence multi-ethnic inclusion. Emotional stability (0.393) and self-awareness (-0.298) constitute moderate factors helping students with adaptability but innovation (least impact) displays insufficient qualities for progressive thinking. As a requirement private institution must add spiritual-moral values to their curriculum and Gurukuls need to update their instructional methods to boost minority engagement throughout Indian education.

Regression analysis is done to show determine the significance of the outcome of Social, Emotional and Spiritual intelligence learning on students without and with categorizing the learning dimensions in terms of their impact level on multi-ethnic students. The process let us obtain a clear idea on the learning outcome and its point(s) of significant variations between overall students' learning and learning specifically developed to include and promote multi-ethnic students' participation.

Regression results are given below:

Table 6: Regression Analysis based on Overall Social, Emotional, Spiritual Intelligence Learning Outcome (Without considering the impacts of learning on Multi-Ethnic students)

Table 7: Regression Analysis based on Social, Emotional, Spiritual Intelligence Learning Outcome By Categorizing the Learning Dimension in terms of Impacts on Multi-Ethnic students

Social Intelligence proved to be the leading important learning outcome according to Regression analysis results because it registered a β value of 3.80 at p < 0.001 level (Table 6). Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence were found statistically insignificant. Social (β₁ = 0.52, p < 0.01) and Emotional (β₂ = 0.27, p < 0.01) learning demonstrate high significance as factors affecting multi-ethnic students according to Table 7 while Spiritual Learning (β₃ = 0.18, p < 0.05) shows moderate significance. The areas which create the greatest impact in school inclusion involving social respect along with morality and leadership need enhanced policy measures to ensure complete learning development.

Based on the analysis results as found and discussed above, study hypotheses are validated in this way:

H1: Socio-Emotional intelligence learning status and outcome reflects inclusion and participation of multi-ethnic students of Modern and Gurukul schools of Delhi

TRUE – The data in Table 7 together with Table 4 shows that Social-Emotional Intelligence learning produces meaningful impacts on multi-ethnic students' inclusion and participation level. The findings from multi-dimensional leadership (3.77) and respect (3.79) and morality (3.76) support this result.

H2: Socio-Emotional intelligence is connected with spiritual intelligence and impact on multi-ethnic students’ individual, social, moral and intellectual growth in Modern and Gurukul schools of Delhi

TRUE – Social respect (0.396), morality (0.390), and leadership (0.404) form an integral connection between Socio-Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence which determines multi-ethnic students’ individual social moral intellectual growth.

H3: Socio-Emotional intelligence learning is necessary to be incorporated in Modern and Gurukul schools as a strategic model to permit fair inclusion and participation of multi-ethnic students’

TRUE – The statistical analysis (Table 7) demonstrates that social learning (β₁ = 0.52) together with Emotional learning (β₂ = 0.27) significantly affect multi-ethnic inclusion. The essential need for Socio-Emotional Intelligence in Modern and Gurukul schools becomes apparent for achieving fair student participation.

This research used on descriptive statistics and exploratory factor analysis alongside regression analysis to measure the influence of socio-emotional intelligence learning and its relationship with spiritual intelligence on the participation and inclusion of multiple-ethnic students. Primary quantitative survey data that are collected from two distinct schools of Delhi – Private Modern and Traditional Gurukuls, confirm that enhancing social alongside moral and individual along with intellectual intelligence creates both collaboration opportunities and social cohesion which supports the global liberal plan for inclusive education. The study establishes the importance of socio-emotional learning through its accurate evaluation of current status and necessity for achieving equal participation of multiracial students between Delhi’s Modern and Gurukul schools.

The study's general approach leads to broad results that do not explicitly variances of learning outcomes based on types of schools. Also, deep analysis based on student demography or geographic variations and students with special needs are not included in this research. Future investigations need to examine these elements because they will create stronger understanding of socio-emotional and spiritual intelligence learning processes within various educational environments.

Educational institutions need to include additional measures, such as, special counseling, workshops and better interactivity framework on socio-emotional learning approaches which address the specific demands of multi-ethnic students. Policymakers need to develop educational programs which unite cultural differences and moral lessons with social unity practices to draw all ethnic student populations into the curriculum.

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