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5. Democracy and Education

Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a “progressive” philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

Rspaight wrote:Just in time for summer reading!

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591


Origin of the Species - Charles Darwin

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao - Mao Zedong
“It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,” wrote Mao.

4. The Kinsey Report - Alfred Kinsey
Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws...

5. Democracy and Education - John Dewey
John Dewey was a leading advocate for secular humanism...His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools...

6. Das Kapital - Karl Marx
"...portraying capitalism as...inevitably and amorally exploit(ing) labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits."

7. The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan
...for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects...

9. Beyond Good and Evil - Freidrich Nietzsche
“Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - John Maynard Keynes
When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - John Maynard Keynes
When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

Wow, that's too funny. It's FDR's fault we're currently fucked.

Rspaight wrote:

Wow, that's too funny. It's FDR's fault we're currently fucked.

Yeah. I'm impressed by the right's ability to blame everything on Clinton -- but these guys went the extra mile. Good work!

Ryan

krabapple wrote:Nothing new...more like nostalgia. Remember in the old 'All in the Family' episodes where Archie could drive Maude nuts by explaining "Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the worst president in history."?

Keynes' basic idea was simple. In order to keep people fully employed, governments have to run deficits when the economy is slowing. That's because the private sector won't invest enough.

Even then, Keynes had a hard sell. Most politicians didn't understand his idea to begin with. In the 1932 presidential election, Franklin D. Roosevelt had blasted Herbert Hoover for running a deficit, and dutifully promised he would balance the budget if elected. Keynes' visit to the White House two years later to urge F.D.R. to do more deficit spending wasn't exactly a blazing success. "He left a whole rigmarole of figures," a bewildered F.D.R. complained to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. "He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist."

As the Depression wore on, Roosevelt tried public works, farm subsidies and other devices to restart the economy, but he never completely gave up trying to balance the budget. In 1938 the Depression deepened. Reluctantly, F.D.R. embraced the only new idea he hadn't yet tried, that of the bewildering British "mathematician." As the President explained in a fireside chat, "We suffer primarily from a failure of consumer demand because of a lack of buying power." It was therefore up to the government to "create an economic upturn" by making "additions to the purchasing power of the nation."

Yet not until the U.S. entered World War II did F.D.R. try Keynes' idea on a scale necessary to pull the nation out of the doldrums — and Roosevelt, of course, had little choice. The big surprise was just how productive America could be when given the chance. Between 1939 and 1944 (the peak of wartime production), the nation's output almost doubled, and unemployment plummeted — from more than 17% to just over 1%.

Never before had an economic theory been so dramatically tested. Even granted the special circumstances of war mobilization, it seemed to work exactly as Keynes predicted. The grand experiment even won over many Republicans. America's Employment Act of 1946 — the year Keynes died — codified the new wisdom, making it "the continuing policy and responsibility of the Federal Government ...to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power."