finding your
many voices

attaining
emotional competence

finding your
inner harmony
renaissance
celebrating the
many-sided person

 

dulcimer
beauty which makes
you feel good
Mac computer
making sense of
a complicated world

The Renaissance idea is as much a real power today as it ever was in its legendary history:

The whole-person ideas which produce a Leonardo have become eclipsed by the needs of reductionist science and technology, by the 19thC. cult of 'the genius', by the market-system's division between 'producer' and 'consumer'; but those ideas are still available to us today, and are the tools we need in producing positive outcomes from the problems facing us in the modern world.

 

Each of us is many-sided: we have a creative side and an analytical side, a rational side and an irrational side, a feeling side and a thinking side, an adult side and a child side, a male side and a female side.

 


attaining
emotional competence

Often one of these sides becomes dominant, while the others lie dormant and remain unnoticed: but we can create situations where they become integrated and honoured, their needs recognised on equal terms: in situations like that each of us can feel good about what we do: we can feel valued by the people around us: we can feel capable of managing the things that face us: we can feel good about who we are.


finding the inner harmony
of your many voices

Of course there are specific skills you need to be able to do specific things: but the difference between "I can!" and "I can't" is one of attitude and context much more than it is one of inborn talent.

Learning is doing: and doing is learning; we're learning all the time - we can chose to discover new ways in which our prejudices were right, our fears justified: or we can chose to face our fears, to learn new things, to develop and grow.

 

There is beauty in something which is well-designed for its function: and being surrounded by beauty makes us function better.

 


making sense of
a complicated world

Here is a wealth of pedagogical and cultural material which demonstrates how these ideas and ideals work in practice today.

You may find

A couple of hundred web-sites are presented here, grouped both by topic, and by date order, latest first.


David Kettlewell died, of heart disease, in April 2011. As he wished, this website is being maintained in memory of his ideas, and his influence on the people he met and taught. All contact details containing his name are null and void, of course, but further details on some of the pages can be obtained from his brother p.kettlewell@skynet.be.
Throughout, texts have been left in the present tense, as he wrote them.
Please note that references to the web-sites
"NewRenaissance/ibs/ee" and
"new-renaissance.net"
are obsolete. Thoses sites are no longer on the internet, and all the files have been re-constructed in the present site - "www.new-renaissance.com""

New Renaissance - the ideas