The Independent Center for Integrative Education: Learning without Limits
WELCOME TO THE INDEPENDENT CENTER FOR INTEGRATIVE EDUCATION!
Our Independent Center for Integrative Education provides workshops, seminars,
and summer camps for children of all ages.
The concept of Integrative Education emphasizes interconnection among
different fields of knowledge and intellectual/practical tools
that we use together to solve real problems in our professional, social,
and private lives. We believe that lack of such emphasis is one of the
major deficiencies of contemporary education paradigm.
The tendency to divide knowledge into independent subjects is relatively new.
When we call someone a Renaissance man, we usually mean that the person is
excellently educated and
excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields.
The original Renaissance men – Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti,
Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin,
among many others – would probably be surprised by such a definition.
Indeed, they hardly saw the world divided into "subjects" and "fields" named physics,
chemistry, art, math, sociology, etc. Many of them considered themselves
Natural Philosophers, the term which covered all kinds of knowledge about
nature. We tend to blame today's compartmentalization of knowledge on
specialization necessary to deal with a much greater complexity of knowledge as
compared to the fourteenth or even seventeenth century, but more plausible
explanation is that it is much easier to develop standardized tests on separate
subjects than on the whole body of knowledge. Since our school system is
test-oriented, it prepares people for the tests rather than real life
activities. In result, the students see the world as a mosaic of disconnected
facts and skills. The notion of the underlying unity of the world is lost in
translation. For more information about our approach please visit our page called
Manifesto
.
For information about our coming activities please visit our page called
Upcoming Events
.
To learn more about Valéry Fradkov please click
here
.
To learn more about Nadia Ivanchikov please click
here
.
With questions and comments please emal us at
nadia@edu.fradkov.com