The Renaissance Connection

From the introduction:

Welcome to The Renaissance Connection, the Allentown Art Museum's interactive educational web site. With the simple click of a mouse button, travel 500 years into the past to discover many Renaissance innovations revealed through the Allentown Art Museum's Samuel H. Kress Collection of European art.

There is a cool flash intro. If your cannot play flash, you can skip it. The website itself has several sections. The Art Explorer is an interactive timeline with all kinds of details of Renaissance life in chronological order. You can access it as a timeline, a map or an alphabetical list.

The Time Telescope focuses on innovations. You can slide the time dial to see how various innovations built on each other. For example, Libraries and Web goes back to Textbooks (1800), First American College (1600), and then to the Renaissance connection and the printing press in the 1400s.

Be a Patron of the Arts is an entertaining interactive "game" that demonstrates the how and why of the money flow. You make choices as you go along that results in a specific piece of artwork created. This website gets an A+ on packing information into a fun format.

There is also an interesting section on The Artist's Life and Lesson Plans to help you utilize the site. This website can be accessed as a plain html site as well. It is still colorful and informative, it just doesn't have all the bells and whistles and interaction that the flash version does. I highly recommend accessing it as a flash if you have that capacity.

A Brief (and brutal) History of Education

From the Psychology Today website, a piece by Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College...

A Brief History of Education

Mr. Gray opens with a statement that presents a viewpoint that I come into constant contact with in my interactions as a homeschooler with the general public...

When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must be some good, logical reason for all this.

He goes on to outline why schools being what they are is a direct result of the historical origins of "school." Not the end result of a logical, rational inquiry into how children learn best.One point that Dr. Gray brings out is that play is the natural way that children learn and that school, as it came about historically, does not mix well with play at all. Learning has become the work of children and not something that happens through spontaneous play. And we wonder why so many students quickly lose their love of learning and any internal motivation to apply themselves to study?

The Great Chicago Fire

The Great Chicago Fire and The Web of Memory

This website was created to mark the 125th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire. The introduction is a great place to start as it describes how the website is organized and the parts of each section. There is a conscious effort to describe how historical accounts come to be and to what uses such a collection can be put. This event is particularly useful in this sense as Chicago was in the world's focal point at a time of great change. Reading through the impressive collection of primary sources is fascinating and is made simpler by the uncluttered layout.

From the site:

This exhibit attempts to make its own contribution to the memory of the conflagration by offering for scrutiny some of the major ways in which the Great Chicago Fire has been remembered. And perhaps its own mode of presentation, through wires and processors and monitors, is particularly appropriate, for it reminds us of the extent to which our sense of the past is always mediated.

Check out the panorama of 1858 found at the bottom of the Great Chicago Fire page. Truly there is page after page of accounts and pictures from before and after the fire. I had to make myself stop reading and clicking and get on with posting it for you.

4th of July - A Different Perspective

In our home school, the study of history has been enlivened by reading from a variety of perspectives. When confronted by information and opinions and interpretations that contradict our current take on the matter, we are forced to research, evaluate, and either defend our own status quo or allow it to be shaped by new information or even supplanted if the new evidence proves itself strong enough. Our view becomes stronger or it comes closer to the truth or both.

So I find contrarian articles like this one to be an interesting challenge. Now in this particular case, I happen to believe that the author has some valid points. But my post today is not to argue for celebrating Happy Secession Day rather than 4th of July - it is simply to encourage other parents not to be afraid of opposing viewpoints. Students will encounter them sooner or later - to my mind, doing so under my tutelage is preferred. History by its very nature always comes presented through a worldview lens once you get past the bare facts...and sometimes even the facts are influenced by the perspective of the reporter.

By the by, here is a wonderful website for examining the Declaration of Independence in close detail.