Our Approach
While pursuing a Master's in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, I had a realization: the most insightful ideas are not necessarily the most challenging to understand. I was blown away by what I was learning, but also intrigued by a simpler question—why was I not introduced to these ideas earlier?
The answer had less to do with difficulty, and more to do with design.
This is when I realized that university curricula are built just like Ikea cabinets.
The Modular Approach
The structure of an Ikea cabinet is built from standard wood planks that also appear in beds, tables, and other cabinets—parts reused across product lines to squeeze maximum efficiency from manufacturing and logistics. This modular approach builds complex systems out of interchangeable, standardized parts. Each part is designed to work with many others through fixed interfaces, making the system easy to assemble, replace, and scale.
Ikea prioritizes scale and affordability over uniqueness and longevity. Its success is symbolic of the deeper virtues of mass production: making decent versions of once-expensive things available to millions.
The logic of modular design dominates modern manufacturing—and it also quietly shapes how most university curricula are designed.
A large university—which graduates thousands of students across dozens of colleges with hundreds of teachers—faces similar constraints as any mass manufacturer. It must optimize for scale, consistency, and administrative ease. The natural solution is the modular approach. That is why universities treat their curricula like a kit, assembled from different books, papers, and lecture units, optimized for topic coverage and easy substitution.
This flexibility comes at a cost. The requirement of having interchangeable parts leads to standardization. In education, this translates into a learning experience that lacks cohesion: a degree is assembled by combining different books and academic papers rather than built as a single, integrated intellectual journey.
The Trade-off
Lego blocks can build almost anything, but they will never match the structural integrity, elegance, or material efficiency of a bridge designed as a single piece. A modular PC is cheap, flexible, and upgradeable, but an integrated system can be faster, quieter, and more power-efficient because every component is designed for every other component.
In the same way, a modular curriculum maximizes access and coverage, but it often underperforms intellectually. Ideas arrive as discrete units, connections are left implicit, and the synthesis that produces real insight is left to chance. The curriculum is stitched together to cover topics, not woven to reinforce relationships.
The student experiences it as one thing after another—an exercise in completion rather than an unfolding inquiry. Learning becomes a chore rather than an exciting pursuit of answers to questions she genuinely cares about.
The Integrated Approach
At Polekon, we have the freedom to take the integrated approach.
Our curriculum begins with a key question. Instead of assembling it from books, YouTube videos, and academic papers drawn from many unrelated sources, the different elements are designed to fit one another as parts of a single intellectual structure. The lectures and essays are written in the same voice and move the argument forward cumulatively, creating a sense of trajectory rather than checklist completion.
Because it is written by me, it reflects my particular way of thinking and synthesizing ideas. You can ask what I meant when I said something in a session, and I will be there to explain it.
The result is harder to scale and far less standardized—but like a well-crafted object, it performs better. It is cohesive, engaging, and driven by the questions that matter.
Experience the integrated approach
See how a coherent argument unfolds across lectures, cases, and readings.