Independent work of students: the tradition and new approaches

Modern socio-cultural conditions of education centers prove that knowledge is becoming a direct productive force, which leads to a new understanding of the content and education quality in terms of its modernization. This article presents new approaches stated in the Russian legislation in the field of education and new strategy to understand the role of individual work of students as the new paradigm of educational system arrangement, which is focused on independent learning activities. It also considers that the subject of independent work should be the development of students’ abilities (skills for information retrieval of knowledge, selfdetermination of research paradigms, etc.).