Blending Chalk, Talk and Accessibility in an Introductory Economics Module
- Contact: David Kraithman and Steve Bennett
- University of Hertfordshire
- Published 6 January 2005
This article is a copy of that published by the Business, Management & Accountancy Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy (formerly the LTSN) in their Newsletter 'Best Practice', March 2004. It is reproduced here with the permission of the Subject Centre and that of the author.
The SMIRK multimedia authoring package has been developed to enable academic staff to produce multimedia presentations in the same way they deliver a lecture or conduct a seminar. Presentations produced by the package can be delivered via a managed learning environment (MLE). The design philosophy seeks to embed accessibility features to support the learning experiences of disabled students.
In the UK, the most commonly used program for preparing lecture material is PowerPoint. Two separate issues arise from this observation. Firstly, we must consider the role of ICT media in producing media, i.e. does it suffer from the same criticisms of non-interactive transmission of information that could be levelled at the traditional ‘chalk-and-talk’ lecture even if it is delivered asynchronously? Secondly, can PowerPoint be bettered by an application tailored to the needs of lecturing staff?
A number of development teams perceive that PowerPoint does not mirror the preparation process undertaken by lecturing staff. In particular, there is no easy way in PowerPoint to combine the elements of the ‘face-to-face’ method of the lecture. Furthermore, there are criticisms that can be levelled at standard presentation software. For example, Tufte (2003) rails against PowerPoint for diluting the sensible transfer of ideas between presenter and audience.
In many ways, the educational deficiencies of the bulletware approach of PowerPoint and similar programs is magnified if the presentations are loaded onto a managed learning environment, such as Blackboard or WebCT.
They tend then to be completely separated from discourse. Of course, many individual academics do realise the shortcomings of PowerPoint and do create richer MLE content that incorporates lecture slides with other materials to the benefit of students.
SMIRK (Simple Media-Integrating Resource Creator) has been developed at the University of Hertfordshire and attempts to overcome some of the implied criticisms of online presentations by making spoken commentary a natural part of a presentation and easing the incorporation of more detailed information through links to other documents in order to overcome some of Tufte’s criticisms of PowerPoint.
Chalk and Talk1
The expression ‘chalk and talk’ is often used disparagingly about non-technological approaches to education, and yet it also articulates a well-used pedagogical method. The traditional face-to-face approach incorporates two important elements.
The first element, ‘image-argument synergy,’ involves tying ‘the experience (the image) to the description (the argument)’ (Laurillard 2002). Computer-based media is seen as a means of achieving some of the desired outcomes and much work in this area has been undertaken at Laurillard’s home university, the Open University (UK). Boyle comments, ‘the job of the designer of IMLEs (interactive multimedia learning environments) is to create effective environments for learning’ (2002). We hope to demonstrate that SMIRK has the potential to involve students actively in their learning experience. The second important element comes from what LaRose, Gregg and Eastlin (1998) called ‘teacher immediacy’. Working from previous research that showed a positive correlation between student satisfaction and ‘instructor immediacy’ (as measured in verbal or non-verbal behaviour, the amount of anecdotal asides in lectures, the degree to which the instructor responded to student queries and exchanged observations with them), they showed that the audio presentation of material over the web, even if it lacked the video of the tutor’s presence, could produce a sense of vicarious immediacy. They found that simply recording lectures and replaying them over the web through an audio stream could prove to be a significantly more engaging medium than simple web pages (LaRose et al 1998; Bennett, Hewitt, Kraithman & Britton 2003). In fact, it has been suggested elsewhere that students with cognitive impairments such as dyslexia may benefit from multisensory teaching methods (University of Sheffield; Beacham, Szumko & Alty 2003).
There are a number of constraints when trying to produce an online version of a typical ‘talk and chalk’ session. They include the lack of technical skills of the lecturer and the cost of production. Furthermore, there are some real accessibility concerns: namely the difficulty of accessing the material thus produced by those with sensory impairments (hearing and sight). The true challenge of designing universally accessible teaching materials therefore is to both preserve the immediacy of the academic discourse while facilitating its transformation into accessible media (Bennett et al 2003).
The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 (SENDA) establishes legal rights for disabled students not to be discriminated against when enrolled on education courses. Thus, a university has legal responsibilities which include anticipating the needs of a disabled person, not treating a disabled person ‘less favourably’ and making ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure that a disabled student is not placed at a substantial disadvantage.
(In the following discussion, we are only considering delivery over an MLE and thus will not extend our considerations beyond web content.)
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are published by the World Wide Web and establish very clear minimum standards against which documents can be tested, though some of them can be difficult to implement.
The Guidelines establish recommendations under 5 main headings.
- Perceivability: Content should be perceivable by all users: images should have alternate text descriptions, audio should be complemented by captioning, structure and appearance of documents remains separate.
- Operability: All interface elements are operable by any users: e.g. duplicating mouse click commands with key strokes.
- Navigability: Render the structure of the media clear to the users such that they are aware of where they are in the system.
- Understandability: Write in clear English (or appropriate language).
- Robustness: Use web technologies that are fully geared to working with accessibility technologies and user agents. (Bennett et al 2003).
Most universities attempt to meet their responsibilities by providing awareness training for academics and making needs assessments of students. This approach pushes the responsibility for compliance to the level of the individual academic. If accessibility concerns could be incorporated into an authoring tool, a great load could be taken off the author’s shoulders. SMIRK tries to relieve the burden on the lecturer.
There are good reasons to incorporate accessibility features into online presentations that go beyond legal compliance. Following Schmetzke, we note that: ‘Technology that is not universally designed, without consideration of the full spectrum of human (dis)abilities, is likely to contain access barriers for people with print difficulties’ and add the observation that the issue is compounded when we include audio and video elements to the delivered output (Schmetzke 2001). Furthermore, Burgstahler (2002) suggests that ‘potential students… may have mobility, visual, hearing, speech, learning and other types of disabilities that could impact their participation in many distance learning classes as they are currently designed’. However, we do not interpret this as meaning a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution but that ‘[a] much better approach is to integrate accessibility reviews into the earliest stages of design…’ (U.S. Department of Justice 2000, quoted in Burgstahler 2002).
We do not attempt in this article to address in depth issues relating to details of technology, disability and learning since these resources exist elsewhere. For example, in the U.K., the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) finances a centre, TechDis, based at York University that gives support to staff in further and higher education (http://www.techdis.ac.uk/, and see Phipps, Sutherland & Seale 2002).
The SMIRK is in development and new tools are added over time, but here we will discuss some, but not all, of its main features (The following is an updated version of content that appeared in Bennett et al 2003).
In terms of its operation and user interface, SMIRK follows the style of a number of current slide presentation authoring tools. However, it is primarily an audio-visual tool, so the recording console has high prominence at the top of the screen. The principle is that the author will produce the slide and then give the narration, so that the visual and audio parts of the slide will be linked thereafter. This gives the user the ability to produce the audio for the slide in more than one ‘take’, allowing them to pause and overwrite already produced audio should it prove unsatisfactory. The SMIRK interface is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: the SMIRK interface
On the top left are the typical drawing and typing tools one expects: the rectangle, the ellipse, the arrow, the polygon, the poly-line – particularly useful for drawing diagrams with graphics tablets. In this sense, SMIRK attempts to reproduce something of the annotation of an overhead transparency that might take place during a lecture. Using the poly-line tool the author is able to circle and draw over items of particular interest in the underlying diagram, as well as write notes freehand.
There are explicit buttons, ‘New Slide’ and ‘Clone Slide’. The purpose of the latter is again to reproduce a typical OHP strategy: overlaying one slide, or cumulative pen strokes, on the underlying diagram.
Finally, as one would expect, there are the typical text tools; normal text and rich format text: the latter tool also allows the user to create content in MS Word (where available) and to incorporate OLE objects such as graphs, organisation charts and equations.
PowerPoint presentations can be imported directly, as can individual graphics, video, Flash and audio files.
For those with suitable supporting software there is a speech recognition version of the program and there are two modes of presentation preparation: ‘edit’ mode and ‘live’ mode. The latter can capture a real time lecture for subsequent editing.
In the interface, accessibility features are foregrounded from the start. The text box at the bottom for the input of slide notes is permanently visible, and the red and green lights at the side of the slide thumbnails indicate whether accompanying text has been inserted. The caption box has spellchecking support in English (various versions) and several European languages to meet RNIB recommendations: screen readers require accurate spelling. The resulting captions are controllable by the use of CSS stylesheets.
The program also allows the user to substitute keyboard commands for mouse clicks in everything but the drawing operations, thus rendering the authoring interface controllable via voice commands and as accessible as possible to the author as well.
At the end of the production of a slide sequence the presentation is exported as a sequence of .jpg graphics and .mp3 audio files. The timing and sequencing of these files are then output in two time-dependent forms: SMIL 2.0 optimized for RealPlayer and HTML+SMIL specifically for Internet Explorer 5.5 and above;
and two time-independent forms:
- framed HTML with a table of contents in the left frame and the content itself in the right: this allows for the easiest and least burdensome access to material, downloaded only as selected by the user;
- a single HTML document, containing all the accompanying text and graphics, ready to be printed out, an accessibility feature particularly appreciated by students everywhere.
The outputs meet the international accessibility standard of being Bobby 502 compliant, whereas the other outputs cannot be machine validated but we have attempted to adhere to the spirit of accessibility compliance by incorporating access Keys, pause and play functionality, non-time dependent access to all links used in the presentation, and the provision of captions.
Figure 2: SMIRK accessibility audit screen
In addition to the traffic lights at the side of the slide thumbnails, the other principal accessibility facilitator in the interface to the program is the accessibility audit screen (see Figure 2), produced immediately after the export command is triggered. This will check if all the slides have alternative caption text, unique titles and audio commentary. Furthermore, any form of multimedia which involves interactivity during a streaming presentation can produce potential accessibility problems: if a link has a duration of 10 seconds, but a user does not click within its active period, the navigational possibility will be lost, thus severely disadvantaging someone who requires greater time to inspect the material. SMIRK therefore creates a special page of HTML for each presentation containing all the external links shown during the presentation. This allows the user to view it even if they have missed clicking on a link while it was active. We have used this feature for media elements such as Flash files and hyperlinks to simulations on other sites and quizzes.
Using the Package in an Introductory Economics Module
Laurillard (2002) points out that the one-to-one tutorial is rarely possible in current university teaching and we must find other ways of replicating such an experience. She points out that the familiar methods used in higher education can be capable of meeting the requirements of a suitable teaching and learning strategy. The methods she isolates are: ‘acquisition: lectures and reading; practice: exercises and problems; discussion: seminars and tutorials; discovery: field trips and practicals (Laurillard 2002)’. The ‘conversational’ model that she espouses sees education as relying on dialogue between the teacher and the student and is related to earlier work by, inter alia, Paul Ramsden (1992). This approach differs in its underpinnings from other theoretical bases such as constructivism and ISD (instructional systems design).
All students in The University of Hertfordshire’s Business School take a core course called Introduction to Microeconomics. In 2003-04, there were 886 registered students. About 20% were international students for whom English was not their first language and about 20 had registered disabilities; mainly dyslexia but including Asperger’s syndrome and muscular dystrophy.
A blended teaching approach was used. For the first six of the ten weeks with new material, the traditional lecture was replaced by an online multimedia streaming presentation delivered through the University’s own MLE, StudyNet. These lectures were made available to students each week, prior to workshops and seminars. The traditional (two hour) lecture slot was replaced by workshop exercises and there were supporting small(ish) group tutorials. The lectures were prepared in SMIRK and contained graphics, audio and captioning content.
Positive informal feedback was forthcoming; both the international students and the students with disabilities favoured the idea that they could replay all or part of the lectures from their workstations. The international students claimed that they thought that it would help with their English language acquisition. Owing to a catastrophic loss of computer files, the results of a partial survey undertaken at the half-way stage of the course have been lost. However, we were able to respond to the suggestions made and adapt the system accordingly: a pause mechanism was programmed in and key conceptual points were explained in the timetabled lecture slots immediately prior to the associated workshop exercise. For the last four weeks of the course, the students were given a more traditional approach, i.e. a one hour lecture based on unaugmented PowerPoint slides followed by a one hour workshop. The idea for this switch was so that the students could comment on the differing approaches. Again, a formal survey was not undertaken but informal feedback indicated a preference for the multimedia approach.
Initial analysis of results indicates an improvement from 33% first time failure in 2003 to 18% in 2004. We posit that the use of teaching presentations created in SMIRK contributed to this improvement.
SMIRK enables academics to produce accessible multimedia presentations. There is commercial software available, such as Impatica and Macromedia Breeze, that transforms PowerPoint into streaming-friendly outputs but they are not as intuitive as SMIRK, do not produce such fully accessible outputs as SMIRK, can be expensive and are not independent authoring systems. SMIRK can be downloaded from http://smirk.herts.ac.uk/ and there is a discussion forum (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/smirk.html)
SMIRK presentations can be an aid to widening access in higher education both for students with cognitive, physical and sensory impairments and for international students.
Beacham, N., Szumko, J. & Alty, J. 2003, An initial study of computer-based media effects on learners who have dyslexia, IMPACT Research Group and TechDis. [On-line] Available: http://www.techdis.ac.uk/index.php?p=3_10_9_3
Bennett, S., Hewitt, J., Kraithman, D. & Britton, C. 2003, ‘Making Chalk and Talk Accessible’, Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Universal usability (Vancouver, Canada), ACM Press, New York.
Boyle, T. 2001, ‘Towards a theoretical base for educational multimedia design,’ Journal of Interactive Media in Education [Special issue of JIME on ‘Theory for Learning Technologies’] [Online] Available: http://www.jime.open.ac.uk/
Burgstahler, S. 2002, ‘Distance Learning: Universal Design, Universal Access,’ Educational Technology Review, 10, 1, [Online] Available: http://www.aace.org/pubs/etr/issue2/burgstahler.cfm
LaRose, Gregg & Eastlin 1998, ‘Audiographic Telecourses for the Web: An Experiment’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 2, [On-line] Available: http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/larose.html
Laurillard, D. 2002, Rethinking University Teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies, Second edition, Routledge Falmer, London & New York.
Phipps, L., Sutherland, A. & Seale, J. (Editors) 2002, Access All Areas: Disability, Technology and Learning, [On-line] Available: http://www.techdis.ac.uk/index.php?p=1_1_7_1
Ramsden, P. 1992, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, Routledge, London.
Schmetzke, A. 2001, ‘Online Distance Education – “Anytime, Anywhere” But Not For Everyone,’ ITD Journal, 7, 2, [On-line] Available: http://www.rit.edu/~easi/itd/itdv07n2/axel.htm
SENDA 2001, Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, [Online] Available: http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2001/010010.htm
Tufte, E. R. 2003, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Graphics Press LLC, Cheshire, Connecticut.
University of Sheffield (Undated), ‘9: Teaching Strategies’, Teaching Students with Dyslexia, [On-line] Available: http://www.shef.ac.uk/disability/teaching/dyslexia/9_strategies.html
1See also Bennett et al (2003) for a discussion.


Have you ever wondered why you do what you do? Some decisions are conscious choices, but more than 40 percent of the things we do aren’t. They are habits and routines of behavior that we have developed over time. They are things that we repeate regularly and tend to occur subconsciously. This explains why we snack on unhealthy foods, smoke cigarettes when we don’t want to, spend more than we earn, watch too much TV, or always are late to meetings.
How do you stop bad habits and create good habits? It is much harder than it seems, which is why only 8 percent of people reach their New Year’s resolutions.
According to Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, you can’t change habits by “powering through” them. This is one of the biggest myths out there. Your willpower is like a muscle, and it gets exhausted throughout the day. This explains why at the end of the day it is much harder to keep to your diet than in the morning, when your willpower is fresh.
Many people make the mistake of trying to change or start the specific habit or behavior. Instead, you first have to understand the overall context of how it is formed and what it is made up of. A habit is not just one action, but a loop. This loop is made up of a cue, a routine and a reward. If you want to change a habit, you need to break the loop that keep the habit going through the cue and routine.
- Cue: This triggers the habit and behavior. It switches your brain to automatic mode. There are five types of cues:
- a place
- a time of day
- a certain person
- a certain emotion
- a ritualized behavior
- Routine: This is the habit or behavior you find yourself doing unknowingly – it can be physical, mental or emotional. Just like getting in your car in the morning to drive to work, you don’t think of every step or decision you make. The more you do it, the less attention you need and the more automated it becomes. The habit takes over, freeing up mental space and conserving as much willpower as possible.
- Reward: This is the pleasure you get from the habit. The reward “burns the habit into your memory,” so it becomes the go-to habit the next time the cue takes place.
If you want to curb a bad habit, first find the cue that acts as a trigger, and the reward you feel from the habit. Duhigg, from his personal experience, found that he had been eating a cookie every afternoon at 3PM (his cue was “a time of day”) and had gained eight pounds. He thought the reward was to satisfy his sweet tooth, but after experimenting, he found the reward actually was socializing with his peers.
He was using the excuse of getting a cookie to talk to his coworkers. After recognizing this, instead of eating cookies, he headed over to a colleague, talked for 10 minutes and then went back to work, eventually losing 12 pounds! It was a matter of teaching his brain to associate a reward with the appropriate habit.
If there are any habits you want to change, you have to properly diagnose and then change them. Check out Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit for more information!


COVID-19 has spread to 150 countries worldwide since it was first discovered in China in December 2019. A total of 422,989 cases have been confirmed as of March 25, 2020. As the severity of the epidemic increases, various countries globally have imposed controls on the movement of people, including Italy, France, and the United States. They call on everyone to stay home, students to suspend classes, and employees to work from home.
It is proven that older people and people with chronic underlying diseases are more susceptible to COVID-19. Since a large proportion of visually impaired people experienced low vision due to age (e.g. AMD) or other disease (e.g. diabetic retinopathy), some people with low vision are probably at higher risk. It’s important to keep healthy during this special time. For people who are visually impaired, special care is needed due to special eye conditions.
With this in mind, Zoomax would like to share some tips to assist visually impaired people with taking better care during the COVID-19 outbreak. Together, we can continue being healthy and safe under changeable circumstances, even with low vision.
Prepare for staying home
If restrictions on movement are implemented in your area, or work/school suspension begins, you will likely stay at home for a while. If your spouse, children, or low vision care provider can’t reach you, you need to think about how to reserve enough food, work remotely, and ensure safety during this time.
If you are a student, please pay attention to COVID-19 update. Below are two notifications about the school plan during the pandemic.
Take care of your eyes
Please note, being a respiratory disease does not mean that COVID-19 will be transmitted through respiratory tract only. It’s easy to ignore that the virus can be transmitted through eyes. COVID-19 guidelines for professional ophthalmologists include a reminder about conjunctivitis, as some COVID-19 cases transmitted through the eyes performed very similar to conjunctivitis in the early stage.
- What Eyecare Providers Need to Know about Coronavirus
- Alert: Important coronavirus updates for ophthalmologists
Care for the Elderly
Seniors make up the largest percentage of people with low vision, since many eye diseases causing low vision, such as cataracts and AMD, are more likely to appear with age. COVID-19 also has a higher fatality rate in older people. If you or a member of your family is an aged person with low vision, please be careful. Here is some useful information.
- How to protect older people from coronavirus
- Stores designate shopping time for seniors vulnerable amid coronavirus: Safeway, Whole Foods, Target and more
In terms of health care indoors, it’s vital to clean the surfaces touched often as the visually impaired people feel the surrounding through touching often. Alcohol and bleach-based disinfectants are commonly used by Optometrists and Ophthalmologists to disinfect the instruments and office furniture. Below is a list of recommended disinfectants from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Some bleach-based disinfectants may fade clothing and leather furniture. If you are concerned that your eye condition won’t work well enough to keep things away from contamination during cleaning, focus instead on plastics, metal and other surface or touchpoints first. Keep them away from sofas and beds when cleaning.
- Many common household cleaning products can kill the coronavirus if you use them properly
- Exposing eyes to bleach chemical may cause serious ocular damage
Pay attention to the notice
Look out for the notices from your low vision community service. These notices usually contain useful information, such as closure time, dos and don’ts if you need to visit, and how to contact them. Some agencies also give advice on how to get help for visually impaired people with flu symptoms or confirmed diagnosis. Some institution notices are as follows:
Enjoy indoor life
When there is no lockdown or quarantine, staying home is also a great protection for the health. But people are easily bored at home for a long time, no matter whether you have a vision condition or not. There are many things you can do to make your indoor life rich and fun!
- Yes, Staying at Home Really Makes You Safer During COVID-19 (Infographic)
- Are you Ready for a Switch?
- The Wiener Staatsoper is closed, but continues to play daily online
Lots of low vision aids providers also have a series of tools to improve visual independence at home. You can shop online and choose the right products. Some manufacturers offer a 30-day money back guarantee to ensure a better purchase experience.
Zoomax will fight against COVID-19 together with low vision communities as we go along. Please follow our Facebook and other social medias for more anti-epidemic tips on COVID-19.


Change is the only constant, as the old adage goes, but over the last century in Western culture, change has been elevated to a moral imperative, a sociopolitical ideology. The roots of this dramatic change in change are found in Modernism. This is not a loose synonym for contemporary times but, rather, an actual artistic school (c. 1880–1920) that fanned out to influence every nook and cranny of our world. Its battle cry was Ezra Pound’s “Make it new!” “The one thing that all modernists have indisputably in common,” writes Peter Gay in his masterful Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, “was the conviction that the untried is markedly superior to the familiar, the rare to the ordinary, the experimental to the routine” (p. 2). Modernism began in the arts, specifically painting, with Impressionism, which was a turn away from the time-honored technique of realistic painting. Traditional painters knew that there were objective realities in the world, and the best painters were those who painted them most beautifully and accurately. Even the painters who depicted heavenly and hellish realities, angels and demons, understood them to be objectively real. Impressionism, by contrast, launched the artistic “inward turn”: the important thing was not objective reality, but one’s subjective experience of reality, which was soon redefined. This was the consequence in the arts of the German Enlightenment figure Immanuel Kant, whose Copernican revolution in philosophy meant that after him, people no longer saw the things of the world as they are, but rather the things of the world as we are. Impressionism was Kant for canvas. In time, Modernism mutated, reshaping literature, architecture, music, education, dance, theater, politics, and religion, including Christianity (we call it “liberalism”). Objective realities do not change, or change very slowly, but man’s experience of the world changes constantly. Modernism, therefore, in a dramatic reversal, meant that the new is the real. It was quickly discovered that the new itself wore out but quickly, so what was considered new was in constant flux. This meant, quite simply, that life must be a permanent revolution.
The Modernists were not the world’s first advocates of permanent revolution (think only of the Anabaptists in the 16th and 17th centuries), but they were the first who envisioned the capacity of their views to reshape all of culture. They have been a spectacular success. In fact, their views have become an ideology, a comprehensive secular program for improving the world, and in this way permanent revolution became the 20th century’s status quo.
The Marxists, consummate political Modernists, bulldozed history in the mad quest for permanent revolution. By the early 1960’s, Mao’s revolutionary China (like all other non-Western revolutionaries, Mao learned his ideology from Western sources, not Asian) had murdered millions, but to the aging Mao, this revolution was getting stale. Mao’s teachings unleashed the Cultural Revolution, a bloody upheaval sparked by youth who considered their teachers and other superiors insufficiently revolutionary (“counter-revolutionaries”), so with Mao’s blessing, they tormented, hounded, humiliated, jailed, and killed the older revolutionaries who had launched and solidified the Chinese Communist Revolution in the late 1940’s. There must always be a new revolution in every generation, more drastic, more bizarre, more spectacular than the last.
How Playboy Became Conservative
In the same decade, here on the other side of the globe, the Cultural Revolution took a different form, but it was animated by the same ever-changing Modernist impulse. In the sexual revolution, bourgeois morality had to go. Premarital sex, recreational contraception, elective abortion, no-fault divorce, ubiquitous pornography, open marriage, homosexuality, bigamy, and pedophilia were new and exciting and just the ticket to replace the tradition of sexual fidelity, that is to say, Christian morality.
But the revolution must never stop. In the 1960’s, the revolution had demanded liberation from traditional marriage. Hugh Heffner and Playboy glamorized recreational heterosexual sex, “no strings attached.” By the 1970s, homosexuals were demanding acceptance as a legitimate self-expression, and why not? Playboy’s Brave New World of heterosexual liberation was growing effete. In the 2000’s, “civil unions” for homosexuals were a serious agenda item. Why should only heterosexual couples be afforded privileged legal status? By 2014, however, the revolution had bulldozed civil unions. Same-sex “marriage” had become a reality. To take the position that Barack Obama took in 2008 in favor of civil unions was to be a counterrevolutionary. To support civil unions was, like the I-phone 3G, so 2008. But by by 2015, even legal same-sex “marriage” was not enough. Reluctance to affirm same-sex “marriage” in one’s business was criminalized. The revolution, you see, eventually doesn’t demand merely legal rights; it demands social approval.
From Civil Rights to “Microaggression”
Similarly, the civil rights movement, which (correctly) demanded that all races be treated equally under the law, was found over time to be culturally drab. By the 1980’s, racial quotas were installed in the workplace and colleges and universities, demanding that underrepresented races receive preferential treatment. Over the last two years, however, racial quotas entered their dotage, so microaggression, the use of language, gestures and attitudes seemingly benign, came to be interpreted as racist, so much so that United States Army felt obliged recently to delete a tweet that used the time-honored military language of “chinks in the armor” since “chinks” offended some Chinese. The revolution refuses to stop.
Medicare and Medicaid, implemented in the 1960’s, installed the federal government in the healthcare business, seizing tax funds for the elderly and indigent. At the time, it was advertised as a modest proposal, nothing akin to “government-mandated healthcare.” By 2003, Republican President George W. Bush spearheaded expanded coverage, and the first administration of Barack Obama worked with a democratically controlled Congress to commandeer one sixth of the economy in what everyone now on all sides would acknowledge is government-mandated healthcare. It is not simply the case, as some libertarians suggest, that government is simply “always getting bigger.” Rather, Obamacare is one example within a larger worldview: novelty in national economics is good in itself. The revolution of the increased size and scope of government must be permanent.
The Conservative Collaboration
The socially and politically conservative reaction to permanent revolution is embodied in William F. Buckley’s famed act to stand athwart history and yell, “Stop!” But history will not stop, and conservatives have done little more than complain about the permanent revolution, while lagging about 10 years behind. Even today, prominent Republicans are quietly abandoning insistence on “family values,” where marriage between one man and one woman is defined as valuable. Conservatives are in permanent opposition to permanent revolution drag right along with it. This is not a recipe for cultural victory.
When Permanent Becomes Temporary
Modernism in its inescapably permanent revolution is a comprehensive worldview. And only comprehensive worldviews can vanquish other comprehensive worldviews. You won’t defeat permanent revolution with a straggler’s de-escalation program. Bad worldviews can only be replaced. Full-orbed Christianity is a worldview. It is more. It is a lived experience. It is a way (to borrow from Heidegger) of being in the world. It believes and lives and breathes the permanent objective reality of the well-ordered cosmos created by the gracious Triune God whose revelation in the Bible is designed to govern all things by the power of the Holy Spirit. It holds that humanity sinned against this loving God, but that the same God sent his own Son, Jesus Christ, to pay the penalty for these sins on the cross, and that all those who cast faith on Him are redeemed and restored to communion with Him. It holds that we live in a God-rigged cosmos, that God gradually restore its virtuous harmony and beauty by the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Word of God. Modernism’s permanent revolution, like all revolutions, will finally burn itself out, gobble itself up from tail to head.
And Christianity in the divinely ordered cosmos will still be standing.
It is for this reason that the only cure for permanent revolution is permanent Christianity. The task of Christians in today’s world is to pray and labor for that exclusively permanent permanence.
 Postmodernism is not so much a reaction against modernism as it is the latest iteration of modernism: hypermodernity. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1990), 3–65. Harvey, like most other Marxists, argues that postmodernism grew from the fertile soil of the permanent revolution of commodities and services in “late modernity,” but the fault rests in people’s actions in the free market, not the free market itself, which for two centuries survived quite well without permanent revolution. See Joshua J. Yates, “Late Modernity,” Culture, Spring, 2008, 17.
 It is ironic that every Marxist regime deplored and suppressed artistic modernism but practiced its basic tenets in its sociopolitical ideology.


Fife is a bonnie part of Scotland, but obviously when it’s called the Kingdom of Fife it’s just a way to commemorate the fact that it was a Pictish kingdom many centuries ago. The word “kingdom” thus has a ceremonial meaning in the collocation “Kingdom of Fife”, but a real, current meaning when we say “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.
The reason for this brief introduction to the meanings of the word “kingdom” is that I wonder whether something similar is true with regard to Scotland’s status as a country.
Most Scots — and definitely everybody on the Yes side — see Scotland as a real country, which just happens to have formed a political union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
However, I wonder whether some people on the No side mean something completely different when they say that Scotland is their country, for instance when they insist that they love their country just as much as the Yes campaigners. Do they interpret “country” in a ceremonial fashion, just like the meaning “kingdom” has in the “Kingdom of Fife”? So do they actually mean that they love their region (Scotland), presumably as part of a real country (i.e., the UK)?
This is important because it relates to the representation Scotland gets in Westminster.
As Wings over Scotland put it recently:
If you’re claiming “my country” as being Scotland, then it’s a country [that] only gets the government its people vote for around 40% of the time. The argument from the No camp is that Scots have a vote in electing UK governments like everyone else does, and should just shut up and accept it if their wishes get over-ruled by the much larger population of England, because that’s democracy and people in Newcastle get Tory governments they didn’t vote for either.
But that only works if you’re saying that your “country” is the UK. The minute you identify Scotland as being a country in its own right, that argument disintegrates. Regions of a country have to accept the overall will. Countries should get the governments they vote for.
In other words, if Scotland is a country, then the UK is a union and Scotland should get many more seats in the House of Commons. It’s also logical that Scotland has a parliament, a separate legal system and even its own football team.
However, if Scotland is just a region which is ceremonially called a country, then the current representation in the House of Commons is completely fair, but it’s then a bit strange why Scotland needs a parliament when other regions don’t (in this world view, four regions have parliaments — Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and London — but eight don’t: NE England, NW England, Yorkshire and The Humber, East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England, SE England and SW England), and there’s absolutely no justification for Scotland having a separate legal system and its own football team.
I’d like people from the No campaign to tell me what kind of country they consider Scotland to be.


‘Gods were gods. Men were men,’ explained our tour guide, Spiros.
‘The ancient Greeks thought there was a difference. Men had to realise they weren’t gods. They couldn’t do the things gods could do. If they tried, it provoked a disaster. The gods got jealous and punished them.’
What has changed?
There are still things humans can and can’t do.
When men get too big for their britches, the gods still punish them.
A dangerous spot
The disaster we were looking at had nothing to do with the hubris of mankind. The problem was geological.
Having built their city over the fault line between the African and European tectonic plates, the ancient Cycladians were in a dangerous spot. Every few thousand years there were bound to be fireworks.
As it turned out, trouble came — big time — in about 1650 B.C. The earth trembled. A huge volcano rose from the sea, near Akrotiri, and blew up.
‘The people had plenty of warning,’ Spiros went on. ‘There are no human bones in the town. No one was killed by the eruption. They were a seafaring people. They were fishermen. They probably got in their boats and headed for Crete, which you can see from here on a clear day.
‘These people were not Minoans, like the people of Crete. But they traded with one another and knew one another.’
The journey to Akrotiri
Our cruise ship had entered the crater in the early morning. By 8am, tenders — smaller boats that bring you ashore when the harbor is too small for the cruise ship to enter — were ready to take us to the island. There we boarded a bus for the short drive to Akrotiri.
‘But I doubt they made it to Crete,’ Spiros went on. ‘Because after the volcano erupted, it collapsed into the lagoon, creating the giant crater we see today. This set off a tidal wave that may have swamped the people of Akrotiri.
‘When it hit Crete, it probably wiped out the Minoan civilization. Many think this is the origin of the Atlantis story. I don’t know.’
There had been people on the island of Santorini for thousands of years before the volcano erupted. They had one of the most advanced civilisations of the time — with indoor plumbing, bronze tools, and professional artists to decorate the inside walls of their houses.
They were not an Indo-European people, apparently. Their written language has never been deciphered.
Traveling the Aegean Sea in a luxury cruise ship is not a bad way to discover ancient history. But we are not here just to learn about the Greeks and the Minoans.
Sailing to Byzantium…or thereabouts
The proximate cause of this journey was an invitation from a colleague, Merryn Somerset Webb. Merryn is editor-in-chief of the magazine we publish in London, MoneyWeek.
We were bid to join the cruise at Catania and stay aboard until we reach Athens. We are meant to look at modern disasters, not just ancient ones.
The lowest rates in 5,000 years
‘Central bankers never wanted to get down to the “zero bound,”’ explained Merryn yesterday. (The ‘zero bound’ describes the theoretical limit for interest rates — at 0% — that preoccupies so many central bankers these days.)
‘They are not idiots. They knew it would cause distortions. And they knew they could get stuck there.’
Merryn showed a group of investors a remarkable chart. Anywhere else, it would have been ridiculously out of place. But since we are visiting 6,000-year-old ruins, it seemed entirely appropriate.
‘This shows interest rates for the last 5,000 years. How they figured out lending rates that long ago, I don’t know. But what it tells us is that since the building of the Egyptian pyramids — that is to say, forever — interest rates have never been this low.
‘When you think of any financial decision you make…or when you try to analyse any price…you have to remember that it is in the context of the lowest interest rates in the history of the world.’
In general, lower interest rates mean higher asset prices.
That’s because the lower interest rates are, the more valuable other assets are by comparison.
Revenge of the Gods
But woe to the price-fixer who fixes the price of money too low…for too long…and then attempts to raise it.
That is the jam in which Janet Yellen finds herself. She is damned if she does — for she will wipe out trillions of dollars from the value of stocks and bonds. She is also damned if she doesn’t — for she will only make the situation worse by driving more money into more unsustainable asset price booms.
This is fine by us. Yellen deserves to be damned. She has willingly and wittingly attempted to do what only the gods can do: determine the correct price of credit. She should have known better.
The rate the market gods would set if left alone could be 2%. It could be 4%. It could be 1%. It could be 4.5%. But it is certainly not zero. An interest rate of zero implies that capital — savings — have no value.
And when Yellen’s predecessor, Ben Bernanke, put it there — lower than it has been for 5,000 years — surely, it must have caused the gods to laugh. Now they seek their revenge.
Humans can successfully fix cars. They can figure out ways to beat casinos and emissions tests. But they can’t successfully fix interest rates. And they can’t beat the gods.
Today, the island of Santorini (named after Saint Irene) is once again populated. Donkeys carry large tourists up the cliff face. White houses sit on the rim of the crater like icing on a cake.
But the town is so crowded with seasonal visitors it is hard to make your way through the narrow streets. Mobs in shorts follow guides who hold up signs to keep their people headed in the right direction.
‘Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have a house here,’ Spiros announced proudly.
For Markets and Money, Australia


Strategies of Confrontation
Strategies of confrontation are the least common response. They serve to bear witness to the faith, expose and end injustice, mobilize others to oppose injustice, and replace it with religious freedom.
Strategies of confrontation are the least common, making up 19 percent of all responses. They are exercised in hopes of exposing injustice, mobilizing others to oppose the injustice, and, most of all, stopping the injustice and replacing it with religious freedom.
These strategies can be found at all levels of persecution, though there is some variation according to context. In relatively open political systems, confrontation is more likely to take the form of public demonstrations, documenting human rights abuses, or seeking redress through the courts. In six cases—Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia, and India—confrontation has taken the form of armed resistance, aimed not at the ruling regime itself but rather at militant groups against whom the regime had failed to protect Christian communities.
Strategies of confrontation are also the most dangerous and likely to incur the repression of the state. This is most true of martyrdom and imprisonment, which can form a strategy (and not simply be a fate) when Christians openly profess their faith or assert their freedom in full acceptance and expectation of these consequences. They do so in order to bear witness. The word martyr derives from the Greek word for “witness,” and such martyrs embody the fullest expression of Christian freedom, testifying with their lives to the ultimate triumph of the God in whom they hope. Like forgiveness, martyrdom is constructive insofar as it points others to a just world. When Chinese Catholic and Protestant leaders accepted decades of imprisonment in punishment for their refusal to join the Communist government’s official church structures, and when Pakistan’s Shahbaz Bhatti stood for persecuted minorities, knowing that a form of martyrdom was their likely fate, they bore witness not only to their God but also to the dignity of all, Christians and non-Christians alike.
Still, these dramatic, high-profile instances of martyrdom are rare. To be sure, it is not rare for many Christians to be killed for their faith every year; however, it is uncommon to see the sort of martyr who gains a high profile within a country or internationally, or whose martyrdom results in serious pressure against a persecuting government.
Next Page : Nonviolence


Click here to enroll in the 2016-17 Delaware School Climate Survey!
What does Positive Behavior Support look like in Delaware?
The DE-PBS Project is a collaborative project with the Delaware Department of Education, the University of Delaware Center for Disabilities Studies, and Delaware Public Schools. This statewide initiative is designed to build the knowledge and skills of Delaware educators in the concepts and practices of Positive Behavior Supports (PBS).
A three-tiered approach is utilized to develop positive learning environments and prevent problem behaviors. The first tier, School-wide PBS, uses universal strategies implemented throughout the school to support the positive behavior of all students. The second tier applies additional strategies for students who need more support at this targeted level. For the remaining approximately 5% of students who do not respond to universal and targeted strategies, individualized supports are developed at the third tier.
The DE-PBS Project is guided by 10 Key Features.


Context matters: A community-based study of urban minority parents' views on child health.
AuthorsBolar, Cassandra L
Akintobi, Tabia Henry
Ferguson, Aneeqah S
MetadataShow full item record
AbstractAmong children, there are substantial ethno-racial minority disparities across a broad range of health-related behaviors, experiences, and outcomes. Addressing these disparities is important, as childhood and adolescence establish health trajectories that extend throughout life.
CitationContext matters: A community-based study of urban minority parents' views on child health. 2016, 5 (3):212-219 J Ga Public Health Assoc
AffiliationSatcher Health Leadership Institute and Prevention Research Center, Morehouse School of Medicine
- Family pediatrics: report of the Task Force on the Family.
- Authors: Schor EL, American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on the Family.
- Issue date: 2003 Jun
- The effectiveness of school-based family asthma educational programs on the quality of life and number of asthma exacerbations of children aged five to 18 years diagnosed with asthma: a systematic review protocol.
- Authors: Walter H, Sadeque-Iqbal F, Ulysse R, Castillo D, Fitzpatrick A, Singleton J
- Issue date: 2015 Oct
- Social determinants of health among African Americans in a rural community in the Deep South: an ecological exploration.
- Authors: Scott AJ, Wilson RF
- Issue date: 2011
- Designing a Mobile App to Enhance Parenting Skills of Latinx Parents: A Community-Based Participatory Approach.
- Authors: Doty JL, Brady SS, Monardez Popelka J, Rietveld L, Garcia-Huidobro D, Doty MJ, Linares R, Svetaz MV, Allen ML
- Issue date: 2020 Jan 24


1. The selection of studies reviewed in this central section, as well as the discussion, draw heavily on Carey (2009). This significant work discusses a wide range of important findings in conceptual development (to which Carey has been a major contributor). Carey defends the Nativist view, but argues for a critical role for learning in the conceptual changes that follow.
2. Chomskyan linguistics was not alone in rejecting the anti-mentalist constraints of Behaviorism. There was interesting work being done along parallel tracks on memory and category learning, and cybernetics and information theory were also beginning to focus attention on internal processes. Chomsky's work had a ‘multiplier effect’ on all these initiatives. Bechtel & Abrahamson 1999 tells the history very well.
3. Chomsky has varied a good deal of the theoretical apparatus over the years, but the picture here—drawn mainly from the Chomsky 1965—was especially influential. See Cowie 2010 for a thorough (but skeptical) discussion.
4. This idea was not itself new. Chomsky 1966 discusses a number of earlier attempts to use language learning as evidence for Nativism and a Rationalist conception of mind.
5. The common dismissal of instincts and reflexes as somehow ‘not counting’ in the Nativist-Empiricist debate is relevant here.
6. Pinker 2002 explores the cultural and intellectual resistance to Nativism.
7. In fact, in Darwin it did—especially with regard to the emotional elements of human nature (1998/1872).
8. Chomsky builds much of his social theory on this idea (see McGilvary 2005 for discussion).
9. We are talking here about the adoption of influential paradigms and the direction of research, not evidence and argument. All the polemical points we've reviewed remain controversial and debate about their ultimate correctness continues.
10. The proper characterization of a module is a matter of ongoing debate (see Robbins 2010 for a detailed discussion).
11. Downes 2010 is a useful summary of the state of the art here.
12. This immediately raises questions about the relation between the innately based information embodied in these Pleistocene tools, and their truth. For discussion of the possible philosophical ramifications of this evolutionary perspective, see Plantinga 1993, Nagel 1997, and Street 2006.
13. See Pinker & Bloom 1990 (and the exchanges following the target article).
14. The resistance to evolutionary explanations in psychology, in a nutshell, is based on the complaint that such explanations have ignored an alternative hypothesis—viz., that larger brains were selected for because they provided a crucial advantage vis-à-vis some challenge x (we will probably never be able to determine what that x was), and that as a side effect of this growth, humans came to have the ability to use language, prove theorems about Hilbert spaces, etc.
15. See, for instance, Gallistel 2000 and Marler 1991. Burge 2010 discusses such animal systems with an eye to understanding their specific representational content and standing (and this bears directly on Nativist claims). His views also bear on the proper interpretation of many of the findings about infants and young children discussed in section 2.
16. But there are attempts to model other domains on language—see, for example, the grammar-type model of morality—discussed in Mikhail 2008 and Hauser 2006.
17. Piaget 1928, 1936/1952, and 1954 are some very important works in this regard, but the output of Piaget and his collaborators is prodigious. For a philosophical discussion of Piaget, see Flanagan 1991.
18. One significant attempt to bring the Piagetian and Chomskyan paradigms into conversation was not a great success (see Piatelli-Palmarini 1980).
20. See for example, Laurence & Margolis 2007 and Leslie, Gallistel & Gelman 2007
21. The system is ‘abstract’ in the sense that it is not a feature of visual perception and/or audition per se, but operates to link the outputs of such systems. See Burge (2010, chapter 10) for further discussion.
22. Here we ignore the possibility that innate systems of this sort might somehow be deactivated or extinguished.
23.Wellman et. al. (2001) discusses two decades of false-belief studies and argues that they support the view that children go through a significant conceptual change in coming to understand belief. There is also now a large literature investigating the neural substrate of belief attribution, the role of mental state language and complement syntax, the influence of executive function ability on mental state attribution, the connection of belief attribution and theory of mind to autism and other developmental disorders, etc. Doherty (2009) is a recent study of the research in this area.
24. Although we don't discuss moral cognition here, these findings bear on the infant's empathy and readiness for moral evaluations.
25. This argument-schema about the Nativist implications of the Classical computationalist view of mental representation has been controversial from the start—see, for instance, the papers in part II of Hook 1969.
27. Note that, as with factory settings of artifacts, such settings may be over-ridden. We may be able to learn new priors, and there may be second-order priors that govern such updating. So if there are innate priors, they are just initial settings, and not hard constraints; they need not close us off to the true nature of things.
28. Here we set aside questions about the ‘psychological reality’ of Bayesian models—e.g., Does the mind/brain actually execute Bayesian $$calculations (or are there heuristics that approximate the results)? Are learners sensitive to the relevant parameters of such calculations? Do they store the right sorts of information? Some of these questions are being addressed; see, for example, Teglas et. al. 2011 for some suggestive findings about infant's sensitivity to probabilities and Xu 2007.
29. Tenenbaum 2006 provides a useful cross-section of current research.
30. This will include not just Bayes' theorem but a range of information pertaining to the collection and characterization of the data, including information about how to sample the world, how and what to store, what conditions to consider reliable, relations between samples and populations, etc.


Conversation Barriers Lead to UnderAppreciation of the Importance of Health Schooling
Communication hurdles will be the main reason for under-appreciation of the value of health instruction for children at the very first several decades of life
Without giving it much consideration, Your children’s bodies may catch disorders from your surroundings. Let’s take sti and health instruction.
STI stands for sexually transmitted diseases, like gonorrhea, chlamydia, genital herpes, syphilis, HIV/AIDS along with also others. They can be transmitted by means of contact.
The very first health obstacle would be your barrier of your system. The body is not well equipped to fight illness, especially when it has to do with the genitals. The system isn’t completely developed and the system does not cope with the clear presence of viruses, viruses or germs, bacteria.
It will take many a long time for the resistance to develop. Individual beings are vulnerable to disorders. Kiddies endure a shorter life span because of lack of proper health education.
In children the body is composed of several levels. To begin with there is the mucous liner. This lining will be the initial field of defense and also handles the body’s defense from infection, but in addition delivers a gentle and elastic shell that allows the child to feel relaxed during any contact with other people.
Subsequent to the mucous lining is compromised the immunity is weakened farther. The human body is able to papers for sale online no longer protect it self from pathogens spread through contact or bodily fluids. Diseases like hepatitis, gonorrhea and HIV/AIDS can disperse among kiddies if their resistance can be jeopardized by an accident, illness or use of contaminated objects.
Wellbeing education commences off at birth. For education is of extreme importance. Education about STIs and proper hygiene may avert the onset of those ailments.
Bilingual health instruction is vital in kids born to mothers with minimal knowledge of the health care issues and the medical care products and services. The parents also must have the ability to understand the risks and demands of their children. There are risk factors which will prevent kids from acquiring health care, all these include low earnings, low literacy rates of training and poor wellness care facilities. Health education tends to make the parents aware of exactly what health concerns their kiddies possess.
For there’s the chance of low levels of immunization, which means less protection against STIs and different ailments. https://www.gcu.edu/degree-programs/bachelor-science-justice-studies They don’t have the capacity to talk regarding outward symptoms, since kids act ill lots of the time and that is a hazard issue. Realizing the causes of vomiting will be the real key wwww.samedayessay.com to avoiding the event of STIs as well as other psychiatric diseases.
Additionally to this there is that the prospect of a poor lifestyle, which includes eating habits and lack of physical exercise, that affect the body adversely. That was a really higher possibility of child weight problems in this circumstance, which might possibly increase the probability of other communicable disorders and STIs.
When kids grow they will not only need to handle these facets but can strike them . Clearly, they are going to know how to guard themselves from those issues, however it isn’t simple to communicate about such issues with these children. Parents want to truly have the self assurance to talk about subjects.
Children have access. It is essential that they understand that which illnesses are and the reason it is important to receive health education in order that they could grow to be a foundation for the remainder of their own lives.


Bath Buildings of Stone
A look at some of Bath's famous Georgian stone buildings.
Surrounded by parkland and rolling hills of the Cotswolds, situated on a bend of the River Avon and graced by some of the most beautiful city architecture in Europe, Bath has the unique distinction of being Britain’s only city with World Heritage Site status.
The city is also the site of Britain’s only hot springs, around which the Romans built a magnificent temple and bathing complex that gave the city its name and still flows with natural hot water.
Bath has around 5,000 buildings officially goverment listed and protected for their architectural merit, and some of the finest Georgian
architecture in Britain is found here - the Royal Crescent, the Circus, the Pump Room, the Assembly Rooms and the Pulteney Bridge are all Georgian masterpieces.
Bath Stone is an Oolitic Limestone comprising granular fragments of calcium carbonate.
Originally obtained from the Combe Down and Bathampton Down Mines under Combe Down, Somerset, England. The mines were under the ownership of Ralph Allen just as the building boom started in Bath, and from his quarries came the distinctive "Bath Stone" used to build the Georgian city, making Allen a fortune.
This fine textured limestone was used by the Romans to build public buildings. The Georgians again revived the use of this stone and many world famous landmarks are constructed in Bath stone. The material naturally weathers to a honey colour and is ideal to form almost any architectural embellishments as well as masonry.
Bath is a city steeped in history and has the only hot spring in Britain.
The Spa city has more officially listed (5000) buildings than central London and most originate from the 18th century.
The stone's warm honey colouring gives the World Heritage City of Bath its distinctive appearance and significantly adds to its cohesion of Georgian buildings that abound the city.
An important feature of Bath Stone is that it is a freestone, that is one that can be sawn or 'squared up' in any direction, unlike other rocks such as slate, which forms distinct layers.
Bath Stone has been used extensively as a building material throughout southern England for churches, houses and public buildings such as railway stations.
Some of the quarries from which the stone was taken are still in use but the majority have been converted to other purposes or are being filled in.
Architects and Builders of Bath
Few cities have had the advantage of Bath in such uniformity in the laying out of their streets and buildings and in their extensions from time to time.
For just a century of work was carried on with extraordinary energy, at first by the humble builders, then by the
s, Wood and his son, and later still by such men as Baldwin, Attwood and , men who united the business of a builder with that of an even more closely than did the two Woods, and who, towards the close of the century, embarked upon such costly and extensive schemes as frequently led, through the economic troubles of those times, to serious financial loss and bankruptcy.
Indeed, at the beginning of the 19th century many buildings were left unfinished; but, fortunately, most of them were afterwards completed, and there is scarcely a trace now of the incompleteness and desolation which must have been so apparent in the early part of that century in Bath.
The Buildings of Bath Collection Museum
- The Countess of Huntingdon’s Chapel, The Vineyards, The Paragon, Bath BA1 5NA
This unique collection interprets the rich architectural history of Bath and the men who transformed a provincial town into the world famous Georgian Spa. It demonstrates how classical design influenced the buildings and illustrates the construction of a house from the cellars to the rafters.
The Building of Bath Museum is located in the historic Countess of Huntingdon’s Chapel, the building is also home to the historic Bath Model, a fully detailed architectural model of the historic city centre, giving a unique insight into the layout of the Georgian City.
As well as opening to visitors during the season, the Chapel houses study days and events from February to November for adults and young people, open to all.
The Building of Bath Collection also houses the Bath Buildings Record, which can be viewed by appointment. The Bath Buildings Record undertook to record, survey and rescue where possible, details comprising the large number of buildings that were earmarked for clearance as part of Bath’s modernisation in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Many of the images from the Bath Buildings Record have been digitised and are available to view online at Bath in Time.
Designed by John Wood the Elder and completed by his son John Wood the Younger in 1764.
The three curved crescents of The Circus form a circle nearly 100 metres in diameter (see main pictues above).
Dr David Livingstone the explorer, Lord Clive of India, Thomas Gainsborough the painter, and William Pitt, MP and Prime Minister once lived here.
The Royal Crescent
Designed by John Wood the Younger and completed between 1767 to 1774.
The Royal Crescent (see main pictures above), described as the finest in Europe, consists of a sweeping arc of 30 houses standing behind a flourish of 114 columns and represents the highest point of Palladian architecture in Bath.
No.1 Royal Crescent was the first house to be built and originally provided luxury accommodation for the aristocratic visitors who came to take the waters and enjoy the social season. A former distinguished resident was the Duke of York, second son of King George III.
Nowadays No.1 provides visitors to the Crescent with an opportunity to see what life was like for the wealthy in 18th century Bath. Each room is an exquisite example of Georgian interior design with authentic furniture, paintings, textiles and carpets.
The superbly appointed Dining Room is set for dessert. Pipes and port are laid out for an evening of cards in the comfortable Gentleman’s Study. Upstairs you can see the elegant Drawing Room, where fashionable visitors took tea, or slip into a delightfully feminine bedroom. Below stairs is a splendidly equipped, bustling Georgian Kitchen. Guides in every room bring the house to life with stories of the past.
In 1968 Major Bernard Cayzer, a member of the shipping family, acquired the house and presented it to Bath Preservation Trust who restored the house using only materials available in the 18th century. No.1 is now administered by Bath Preservation Trust.
More Georgian Homes
Bath is famous for its crescents and terraces of houses here are some more of important architectural merit.
Lansdown Crescent dates from 1789
Lansdown Crescent is on the left of Lansdown Road, its quite hidden away and is one of the last buildings of grand architecture just on the edge of Bath.
Designed by John Palmer (also designed the Pump Room) and constructed by a variety of builders between 1789 and 1793.
Lansdown Crescent comprises 20 houses, each originally having four floors together with servants' quarters in the basement.
Arranged as a crescent, this building has a clear view over central Bath, being sited on Lansdown Hill near to but higher than the Royal Crescent. William Beckford lived in Nos 19 and 20.
Sheep can often be seen grazing on the parkland opposite - something not noted in any other city.
The crescent was built between 1815 and 1829 - the architect was John Pinch.
Situated on the Lansdown slopes just below Lansdown Crescent, Cavendish Crescent is a beautiful example of the the architecture of its time. Due to its size and shape it is often twinned with Somerset Place which is just to the North and equally worthy of a visit.
The architect for Camden Crescent was John Eveleigh and it was built during the early 1790's . Unfortunately the land was subject to landslip and so what we now see is not the complete crescent. It was originally designed to have twenty two houses in a gentle curve, flanked by straight ends with five houses. Only the straight end at the west end of the crescent still exists.
When looking at the crescent, one can see that the very grand centre is not in the centre at all, and the centre's pediment is held up by five Corinthian columns (very bad practice regarding classical architecture-there should be an even number of columns).
Above the doorways can be seen a single elephant's head, which was a part of the coat of arms of Charles Pratt, Marquis of Camden.
Somerset Place lies above Cavendish Crescent.
A crescent in its own right, separated from Lansdown Crescent and Somerset Lane. Designed by John Eveleigh and built in stages between1790 and 1830.
Initially Eveleigh built two semi-detached houses without curved facades and then added on crescent shaped wings on either side. Hence the reason for the very dominant central feature with the unusual broken pediment on top.
Somerset Place was badly damaged during the air raids of 1942, and the central houses were gutted by fire - fortunately the facades survived. Look out for the very grotesque looking masks on some of the doorway keystones!
The Paragon in the Walcot area of Bath is a street of Georgian houses which have been designated as listed buildings. It was designed by Thomas Warr Attwood. It now forms part of the A4 road system. John Palmer finished the project.
Great Pulteney Street
Great Pulteney Street (see main picture above) is a grand boulevard that joins Pulteney Bridge to Bathwick in the eastern side of Bath.
Commissioned by Sir William Pulteney, it was designed by the architect Thomas Baldwin and completed in 1789. The council wanted to expand the boundaries of the City, and Sir William's estate was conveniently situated just over the other side of the River Avon.