[ Letter from the President ]
From
the Real Data
to the Real
Knowledge

Dr. Boris Berenfeld,
ILAET Founder and President:

Modern reality makes people to face complex tasks not divided into academic disciplines, but present multidisciplinary challenges involving information retrieval, critical analysis, model building, and forecasting. Contemporary education has to be flexible and follow the changing demands of modern life, be same multifaceted and complex. And this transforms education into an integrated practice with no room for dogmatism, once and for all established methods and immutable postulates.

Our approach is multidisciplinary learning projects based on collective data collection and cooperative analysis. The goal is for students to take an active stance on data by independently discovering the mechanisms of processes in the world around them, whether in biology, sociology, cultural studies, international relations, climate change, ecology, history, or political science.
Students collect information in a distributed database, guided by their own hypothesis and / or generally accepted (in order to verify it), and using mathematical tools they build models, verify them, and in result – prove or refute that hypothesis or model.

We believe that involving students not only in the solution, but also in the formulation of a learning problem, as well as the joint search for solutions is the key to creating a modern personality, ready for challenges and active participation in building a democratic society.