Welcome!
Belarusian Vedic Center
Director: PhD (in History) Mikhail I. Mikhailov
E-mail: mihailov@mogilev.by
Tel.: 375-2233-25867.
Mission
The Center is an independent, non-partisan organization dedicated to
elevating public awareness and promoting the discussion of ethics
and other disciplines in a global context. As an interdisciplinary
think tank, the Center focuses on activities in education and
research being a nucleus of an ethical revolution, which we are
putting through an education in Belarus today.
The mission of the Center is to unite scholars, researchers,
intellectuals, people of the arts and culture, journalists and
public figures interested in exploration of the very sources of
human and primarily Indo-European civilization; to train students,
and to be a forum for public lectures and discussions, a place for
intellectual, cultural and artistic dialogue, contact and
cooperation with colleagues from Belarus, India and Eastern, Central
and Western European countries.
It is new specialist research center, which devotes particular
attention to one subject, building Vedic Academy in the heart of
Belarus, which will be a school of excellence in a deprived area.
There will shortly be opened a University, which will offer
high-quality, easily accessible skills courses through the Internet.
Our aim is to revive the ancient Vedic Belarusian tradition and to
foster studies and understanding of the crucial problems of the
European, American and Asian civilizations, primarily, in the
context of the Indo-European global integration process.
One of special objectives is to raise sharply global ethics
awareness.
The current initiative is addressing an imperative need of
developing an independent Belarusian Research Center for Indological
and Vedic studies. We view the Center as an independent cultural
institution testing disciplinary boundaries, problems of reform of
education, and moving into newer fields of inquiry within the Social
Sciences and Humanities in Belarus.
Principles of the Center are Reorientation of the Belarusian
cultural tradition towards wider range of contemporary ideologies,
Western and Eastern; Study and Application of the best European and
Indian cultural practices and contemporary training techniques;
Comparative cultural, literary and philosophical approaches for
proper understanding and interpretation of the Belarusian culture
and history; Implementation of the values of an open and democratic
society, and development of Critical thinking.
We are fully aware of the need to enhance, better organize, and
better utilize the human and cultural potential of the Belarusian
people.
Center was founded in 2000 to provide an interdisciplinary forum for
professionals interested in research in Social and Cultural sciences
and to offer the highest quality, state-of-the-art leadership
programs that improve society by inspiring, developing, and
supporting college student leaders. The aim is to identify, affirm,
and promote the values of academic integrity among students and
researches. By encouraging and supporting research on factors that
affect ethical integrity, the center hopes not only to help students
develop models that address issues of ethical choice, but also to
make business and government leaders more aware of the impact their
decisions can have on the moral development of college students and
the society at large. The center holds an annual conference and is
currently developing an Ethical Guide designed to be used by
colleges and universities interested in strengthening their ethical
integrity.
One of our primordial concerns is about the links of moral theory
with educational practice. Through its program of conferences and
publications, Sarasvati hopes to serve as a resource to educators,
practitioners, and the public in matters related to liberal
education and social development, moral responsibility and
historical-political awareness.
Sarasvati is committed to encouraging and developing high-quality
interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching within the fields of
practical and professional Ethics, History, Philosophy and Political
Sciences, Indology, Indian languages (Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali,
Tamil).
At its annual meeting, Sarasvati previews to host the
Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, a competition among college students
that focuses on responding adroitly to complex ethical questions and
dilemmas.
Sarasvati encourages the development and enforcement of standards of
conduct for students in an educational endeavor that fosters
students' personal and social development. Students must assume a
significant role in developing and enforcing such regulations so
that they can be better prepared for the responsibilities of
citizenship.
Sarasvati is viewed also as an independent organization that
promotes change and reform in higher education to ensure its
effectiveness in a complex, interconnected world. Sarasvati recently
initiated a number of research projects in different disciplines.
The projects are anchored by most vital issues of universal interest
but deeply rooted in our Belarusian cultural milieu. They are
designed to provide resources to faculty wishing to explore
community-based learning in and through the academic disciplines.
The organization will also be convening a series of meetings and
conferences to promote service-learning collaboration across the
disciplines.
One of our projects is a multiyear organizing effort to initiate a
dialog about religious pluralism and spirituality in higher
education. It aims at developing new models and strategies to
support religious diversity on campus and explore how spirituality
can serve as a web that interconnects educational initiatives such
as college student values, moral and ethical development,
experiential education, health, and community service.
Sarasvati is an educational organization whose purpose is to convey
to successive generations of college youth a better understanding of
the values and institutions that sustain a free and just society
through millenaries. To accomplish this goal, Sarasvati has
established an integrated program of lectures, conferences and
publications that reaches dozens of college students and faculty and
hundreds across the country.
We want to improve the moral quality of society by advocating
principled reasoning and ethical decision-making. One of the
Center's programs is to form an ethical Coalition of youth
organizations and civic groups that supports the ethical development
of young people through programming that focuses on practicing the
Six Pillars of Character: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility,
fairness, caring, and citizenship.
Today, the Center conducts research and publishes educational and
community resources to help citizens act responsibly and effectively
on the challenges facing our society. The Center recently developed
and put on the Internet ethical education study guides and
activities for use in college and university classrooms.
We are acutely aware of the importance of the global problems, the
international dimensions of our lives, and the Center has evolved as
a research body that would address pressing social and cultural
problems and the need for developing local initiatives to respond to
them. Our programs and services will promote the study of the most
complex and vital areas of public consciousness and ideology in
Belarus.
The scope of problems
tackled and the method of ideologically independent and objective
approach demonstrate our sincere desire to improve upon and bring in
an innovation in the whole area of Human and Social sciences in
Belarus. This attempt intends to contribute to the building of a new
ideological environment, to improve teaming and teaching in
community college through development, implementation, and
evaluation of alternative educational programs and services, and is
timely and essential for the reform of education and research in the
domain of Social Sciences and Humanities in Belarus. It is targeted
primarily on Belarusian intelligentsia, political and cultural
leaders, students, and also on large reading circles.
If the initiative described is not all-inclusive, it is fully
justifiable, as a serious gap exists in Social Studies and education
in all post-soviet republics, Belarus not excluded. A number of
disciplines and themes are either absent or underdeveloped due to
the dominance of one-sided ideology during a large period and
Social-Cultural Studies having been considered during more than a
century peripheral. In a perspective, appropriate programs may be
allowed improvement and innovation through similar initiatives that
have a system wide impact on the whole Belarusian cultural milieu.
Sarasvati promotes a broad understanding of the essential role of
public higher education in our society. Among its projects is the
Community Leadership Institute, which can provide professional
development opportunities for newly appointed chief officers at
community grassroots organizations.
Dedicated to the belief that equal educational opportunity and a
strong higher-education system are essential cornerstones of a
democratic society, Sarasvati recently established an initiative to
strengthen the role of colleges in promoting civic responsibility
among students.
The center is dedicated not only to sustaining democratic theory but
also to extending democratic practice. It approaches democracy in
the spirit of Walt Whitman -- as a mode of living rather than as a
set of strictly political arrangements. The center promotes
research, conferences, and empirical studies of democratic theory.
The significance of this new development in the sphere of Belarusian
scholarship and education is of primary importance, as Belarus'
future depends on its community colleges meeting the expanding
educational needs of its population.
The main areas are History, Political and Social Studies, Cultural
Studies, Literature, and Philosophy, which will be explored via a
number of programs.
History comprises European, Asian, and American Studies.
Political and Social Studies include such subthemes as The Choices
for the 21st Century Education; and Politics, Culture, and Identity.
The Choices for the 21st
Century Education project seeks to promote improvement and
innovation through non-traditional instruction, program development,
and faculty/staff development, and integrate state-wide challenge
initiatives.
The Major interest of the
Politics, Culture, and Identity project is focused on the
interdisciplinary, comparative study of the cultural processes
influencing political identity formation, including the symbolic
processes through which people acquire their understandings of the
political universe. It includes the role of religion, philosophy and
state in fixing ethnic/racial/religious identities; identity
formation and political transition (with a special emphasis on
Belarus); identity and citizenship in Western Europe and America;
historical perspectives on ethnic harmony and violence in borderland
areas.
Cultural studies address the recovery and renewal of people's
culture through continuing study of Indo-European as well as local
and regional cultural history.
Literature, Philosophy and Religion embrace Comparative Literary
Studies, Comparative Philosophy of The West and The East, Global
Ethics and Environment, Global Interactions of Belief and Value
Systems, Hermeneutics, Semiotics, Indological Studies with a number
of subthemes. Global Ethics and Environment subtheme is cantered in
study of ethics in the perspective of tremendous technological,
economic and social changes produced by Globalization. Global
Interactions of Belief and Value Systems program addresses the
circulation and interpretation of cultures, including questions of
cultural resilience and regeneration; the consequences of diasporas,
immigration, and new forms of citizenship; and issues of race,
gender, ethnicity, and religion. Of particular interest is analysis
of the impact of the mobility of ideas and people on an increasingly
interconnected global society.
We realize also the need for a Translation Project in Social
Sciences and Humanities, and Web-based program for our
distance-learning students.
The independent research in Humanities in the new states such as
Belarus faces shrinking public resources, as the government retreats
and private funding is inadequate. The Center is in its starting
stage and acutely needs international support.
Gorki, Belarus
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