The history of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults(Kanoon),which has been established to facilitate the intellectual and emotional development of children and young adults, goes back to the mid 1960’s. Since then the cultural, literary, educational, and artistic arena in Iran has witnessed the development, evolution and success of this effective organization.
Millions of children and young adults turn the pages of Kanoon’s books every day, listen to their Iranian tales, fables, proverbs, and allegories, and decorate their plain hearts and minds with jewels of knowledge and awareness. This Institute has been able to closely communicate with its juvenile audience faceto-face through its 900 cultural centers all over Iran by presenting cultural, educational and artistic activities. Kanoon’s trainers have permanently performed over 37 different cultural and artistic activities in its libraries at the very heart of its centers including lending books. These activities include story-telling, poetryreadings, puppet-shows, screening movies, providing bulletins, reading books, painting, potery, free discussions, etc. On the other hand, the literary, cultural and artistic masterpieces published and produced at this institute have got a vast audience all over the country. Publishing 140 book titles in more than 3 million copies annually, producing hundreds of minutes of long and short films, whether alive or documentary or fictional, releasing dozens of music cassetes, performing plays and puppet-shows, and providing useful toys and hobbies as well as some educational softwares, are all included as the wide variety of activities Kanoon is involved in. Holding different festivals, such as A Week with Kanoon,Story-telling, Puppetshows,Children’s Books, International Animation Festival, Children’s Press, etc are Kanoon’s other activities. Iran Language Institute, which is one of the subcategories of Kanoon, is responsible to teach people a variety of languages such as English, German, French, and Arabic through its 42 branches all over the country.
All these activities are indeed supervised by a reliable research support provided by Kanoon’s Research Section. Meanwhile, Kanoon’s activities and performances are not restricted to Iran’s boundaries. Rather, Kanoon’s permanent and prevalent cooperation with other international organizations and its constant presence in art competitions in the world have provided Iranian children, youngsters, artists and writers with brilliant opportunities for fame and honor, which have been achieved to some extent so far. Among the honors to count are the numerous prizes and colorful medals won by Kanoon in different international painting competitions, the film festivals, illustration exhibition and competition and…, Children of Heaven nomination for Oscar Prize, and other awards such as the Golden Plaque in Bologna, the Grand Prix and Golden Apple in Bratislava and many more.
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