Dewey and Montessori

Scientific pedagogy is a way of helping children with learning in school. Schools were at first furnished with the long, narrow benches upon which the children were crowded together. Then came science and perfected the bench. In this work much attention was paid to the recent contributions of anthropology. The age of the child and the length of his limbs were considered in placing the seat at the right height. The distance between the seat and the desk was calculated with infinite care, in order that the child's back should not become deformed, and, finally, the seats were separated and the width so closely calculated that the child could barely seat himself upon it, while to stretch himself by making any lateral movements was impossible. This was done in order that he might be separated from his neighbor. Freedom, like physical education, is also very important in education, giving time to rest the mind.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of modest means. Like his older brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, from which he graduated in 1879. In 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago where he developed his belief in Empiricism, becoming associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter, which was published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in Logical Theory. During that time Dewey also initiated the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to actualize the pedagogical beliefs that provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Social Progress. Disagreements with the administration ultimately caused his resignation from the University, and soon thereafter he relocated near the East Coast. In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association. From 1904 until his retirement in 1930 he was professor of philosophy at both Columbia University and Columbia University's Teachers College. In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was a longtime member of the American Federation of Teachers.

Adam Smith 

Laissez-faire philosophies, such as minimizing the role of government intervention and taxation in the free markets, and the idea that an "invisible hand" guides supply and demand are among the key ideas Smith's writing is responsible for promoting. These ideas reflect the concept that each person, by looking out for him or herself, inadvertently helps to create the best outcome for all. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest," Smith wrote. By selling products that people want to buy, the butcher, brewer and baker hope to make money. If they are effective in meeting the needs of their customers, they will enjoy the financial rewards. While they are engaging in their enterprises for the purpose of earning money, they are also providing products that people want. Such a system, Smith argued, creates wealth not just for the butcher, brewer and baker, but for the nation as a whole when that nation is populated with citizens working productively to better themselves and address their financial needs. Similarly, Smith noted that a man would invest his wealth in the enterprise most likely to help him earn the highest return for a given risk level. The Wealth of Nations" is a massive work consisting of two volumes divided into five books. The ideas it promoted generated international attention and helped drive the move from land-based wealth to wealth created by assembly-line production methods driven by division of labor. One example Smith cited involved the labor required to make a pin. One man undertaking the 18 steps required to complete the tasks could make but a handful of pins each week, but if the 18 tasks were completed in assembly-line fashion by 10 men, production would jump to thousands of pins per week. He applied a similar logic regarding wealth generation and efficiency to British rule over the American colonies. According to his calculations, the cost of maintaining the colonies was simply not worth the return on investment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqMK3LmHPZs

Galbraith and Reich

John Kenneth Galbraith was America's most famous economist for good reason. A witty commentator on America's political follies and a versatile author of bestselling books that warn prophetically of the dangers of deregulated markets, corporate greed, and inattention to the costs of our military power, Galbraith always made economics relevant to the crises of the day. This first full-length biography is, in Richard Parker's hands, an important reinterpretation both of public policy and of how economics is practiced. In 1938 he left to work in New Deal Washington, eventually rising to become FDR's "price czar" during the war. Following his years as a writer at Fortune, where he did much to introduce the work of John Maynard Keynes to a wide audience, he returned to Harvard in 1949 and began writing the books that would make him famous.

Robert B. Reich is a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. As the nation’s 22nd secretary of labor, Reich implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, led a national fight against sweatshops in the U.S. and illegal child labor around the world, headed the administration’s successful effort to raise the minimum wage, secured worker’s pensions, and launched job-training programs, one-stop career centers, and school-to-work initiatives He has written 11 books, including “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers “The Future of Success” and “Locked in the Cabinet”; and his most recent book, “Supercapitalism.”

Marx and Carnegie

Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels published their tract, The Communist Manifesto, in February 1848, just months before much of Europe was to erupt in social and political turmoil, and the Manifesto reflects the politics of the period. In the summer of that year, youthful revolutionary groups, along with the urban dispossessed, set up barricades in many of Europe’s capitals, fighting for an end to political and economic oppression. While dissenters had been waging war against absolutism and aristocratic privilege since the French Revolution, many of the new radicals of 1848 set their sights on a new enemy that they believed to be responsible for social instability and the growth of an impoverished urban underclass. That enemy was capitalism, the system of private ownership of the means of production. 

In The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie that describes the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper class of self-made rich. Carnegie proposed that the best way of dealing with the new types of wealth inequality was for the wealthy to redistribute their surplus means in a responsible and thoughtful manner. This approach was contrasted with the traditional patrimony, where wealth is handed down to heirs. Carnegie argued that surplus wealth is put to best use when it is administered carefully by the wealthy. Carnegie also argues against wasteful use of capital in the form of extravagance, irresponsible spending, or self-indulgence, instead promoting the administration of said capital over the course of one's lifetime toward the cause of reducing the stratification between the rich and poor. As a result, the wealthy should administer their riches responsibly and not in a way that encourages "the slothful, the drunkard, the unworthy."