Europeana Collections, a Portal of 48M Free Artworks, Books, Videos, Artifacts

Agree so much. However I want to add that motivation plays a factor here as well. I know too many people who think that once high school is over, reading is over. As someone who spends 1-2 hours per day reading, not counting software blogs, I am horrified by that attitude. And how many people goofed off in school? (I admit I did that a bit too much back then)

"the person without the parenting or cultural environment that promotes learning"

Exactly. I saw a program a few years ago in Milwaukee. Basically they assigned mentors to struggling schools to help the kids work through the problems that were distracting them. The results were solid double digit improvements in both the percentage of kids passing, and reducing the number of disciplinary incidents. I wish I could recall the name, I have searched for it before. This needs to be in every struggling school.

The search allows for filtering by licenses.

Not all content is reusable, for instance the Art Nouveau Posters [1] has :

  Free Reuse      62   cc-0, pub domain, cc-by 
  Limited Reuse  142   cc-by-nc-nd, cc-by-bc-sa
  No Reuse        64   in copyright

[1] http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/collections/art?q=posters+...

Europeana is an EU initiative to bring together digital collections of museums, archives, etc from around the EU and make them accessible, findable etc. While they try to encourage everyone to use CC it depends on the organisation that is putting the stuff online, their own rights to it (eg art is often loaned) and how it's put online (commercial photographer or similar might offer to put them for free online in order to be able to sell reuse licenses). So it's a mixed back but last time i checked most seemed to be free to use and share.