Montessori & Dewey

Montessori's child development plan consists of kids being allowed the opportunity to learn for themselves. Children are naturally curious and will seek out new knowledge and learn it better because they have sought it out. It's no surprise that adults attempt to place restrictions and milestones for child education because we have a lack of curiosity and favor hard stats on a child's progress. Montessori has mentored and taught enough children to know exactly how children learn best and it is certainly not happening with the schools we have in place.

We have put kids in restrictive seats that allow them no personality, freedom, or ways to experience things. Most people learn better through experience, using the senses to provoke memorization. Montessori knows that school desks immobilizes the children and deprives them of freedom and consequently their knowledge.

Dewey's Thinking in Education attempts to show the importance of actually thinking for learning. He means people being challenged by real or relative problems that have an end goal of being solved instead of ones that are artificial. Dewey, like Montessori, realizes that that places at which children learn are not conducive to the learning they need. He believes that people need to experience and reflect on things which requires an environment that they can interact with the things they are learning. It also requires people to not force upon kids a quota of knowledge with the end goal only being the test but instead fixing the problem for the sake of challenge. Since people learn through experience and reflection it requires a problem to solve. These problems must involve a certain amount of familiarity so that they can be solved but also an amount of mystery. When they solve these problems they become their accomplishments and will commit better to memory.

Smith: Of the Natural Progress of Opulence

Smith's views are accurate for a time in which people and interactions are much more localized or on a very broad historical basis. However, saying that farmers are first with manufacturing and foreign commerce following later is true only in a time period where people cannot easily access their nation and the globe. In American history we put in place the homestead act in an effort to increase population in areas where little existed but had perfectly good farmland. If his theory was correct people would have already settled this area and only when all farmland was taken would manufacturing begin. Also by the late 19th century railroads were sprawling across the eastern U.S. and a few stretched into the mid-west that were primarily made to transport manufactured goods.

Another part of his theory is based around the thought that people are low-risk low-reward creatures. Being that people are less likely nowadays to start a farm, which is relatively secure (with government involvement), and more likely to work for a company or start their own business. Both of these are not only more risky, as your business could fail or your job be taken, but also more rewarding (sometimes).

People nowadays would consider stocks, bonds, and CD's as comparable investments to land. A wealthy person makes much of their money in the stock market. They essentially produce nothing but still make a lot of money through speculation, buying low and selling high. Many of our wealthiest people are not producers but instead make their money off of the producers because they have the money required. 

Galbraith & Reich

Galbraith

The premise that Galbraith makes, that America is an affluent society, is quite correct. America is around the sixth richest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita. Affluence is primarily shown through leisure, the amount of wealth an average person has to their name, and things such as the arts that demand money to be supported. Other things such as infrastructure are both a sign of affluence and a catalyst for influence. As you read Galbraith mentions that this is also important to the poor to help them get to work without having a vehicle. He does not mention how important it is to attract businesses. The wealthiest nations in the world, Qatar and Luxemburg invest heavily in infrastructure, something the united states has failed to do and is falling behind in.

Reich

A government should, for a time, attempt to provide work for routine workers who might not otherwise have it. As mentioned earlier America's infrastructure is lacking, this would be a perfect outlet for unemployed workers. This should not be government's main focus though. It should instead concentrate on the one thing America was good at in its past, which is ideas. In our nation's history we have been a developer of ideas. We arrived at the moon first, invented coca-cola, and developed technology that other countries acquired much later. The one thing we were good at is now gone. As our education system lags behind other developed countries and their children trump ours in test scores consistently, we lose our footing in the global economy. Reich describes that the stable jobs left for American workers are the ones that require knowledge. As other countries invest more in their education, more in research, and don't spend absurd amounts of money on precarious wars, the days of America as a world power will fade ever faster into history. So, in conclusion, we should attempt to carry our routine workers for a time but most of our efforts as a country need to be on maintaining our position in the world through investment in ourselves that matches that of other comparable nations.

Karl Marx & Andrew Carnegie

Marx

Marx is eloquent in an understated way. He simply takes the argument against him and disproves it to the best of his ability. Marx does leave out important aspects of the arguments and simplifies them down to the point at which the argument against him sounds absurd and pointless. His counter-arguments are effective though because he assumes his audience is either of the bourgeois class or a critical proletariat. Though I'm doubtful of communist government's effectiveness, I do feel that many issues he raises or very true and are very deserving of thought. It is unfair to automatically close your mind to these kinds of readings simply because of labels. He feels as though based on past revolutions that communism is an inevitable change. He has to try to convince people, however, because the world he lives in is so antagonistic towards the idea even though some may agree with him.

Marx views the bourgeois family very cynically. He claims that both women and children are being exploited and that the entire family is based on capital gain off of the backs of the proletariat class. He wants less inequality by giving women more rights. I think that some of Marx's views have been realized as women have been getting closer to equal pay and more social mobility. Children are now getting much better educations and are not victims of child labor. People as a whole will continue to make changes like this for the better.

Carnegie

Carnegie, although a smart man, is wrong in his thinking that the rich can distribute money better than anyone else. Only each individual person knows the needs of them and their families. His methodology is flawed in that he forgoes paying working people more in wages by instead gaining more money for the rich. Our nation at this very moment is experiencing income inequality comparable to the 1920's. It is no coincidence that people are living off of less and less money with a minimum wage that, if raised with inflation, would be $15. If Carnegie's philosophy was true regular people would be living substantially better those before them. Those who are already rich though and cannot raise any workers paychecks should follow Carnegie's book though. That method at least does benefit people a little bit as opposed to not at all.