Livia Gersho — The 19th-Century Activist Who Tried to Transform Teaching

The daughter of a union worker and activist, Margaret Haley became a teacher at age 16. A few years later, she found her way to teacher education classes based on John Dewey’s ideas of progressivism and teaching as a profession.

Haley criticized the “factoryizing” of education that turned the classroom teacher into an “automaton.”…

Haley harnessed the progressive idea of democracy as the central purpose of schools.

“Haley argued that unionization would join progressivism’s democratic convictions to labor’s democratic practices, and thus, fulfill education’s responsibility to publicly uphold ‘the democratic ideal,’” Hlavacik writes.

Best line.

“Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine,” she said. “The other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life.”

The struggle goes on.

JSTOR Daily
The 19th-Century Activist Who Tried to Transform Teaching
Livia Gersho

Was Dewey a Darwinian? Yes! Yes! Yes! — David Sloan Wilson interviews Trevor Pearce

On "social Darwinism."

Evolution Institute
Was Dewey a Darwinian? Yes! Yes! Yes! An Interview with Trevor Pearce

David SloanWilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo interviews Trevor Pearce, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Geoffrey Hodgson — Imagine Economics as an Evolutionary Science

Veblen took the view that humans were driven by habit. Habits are guided by both inherited propensities – called instincts – and existing institutions. A habit is a learned capacity to act or think in a particular way. Instead of beliefs being prime movers, they too are based on habits.

As the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey argued eloquently in his 1922 book Human Nature and Conduct, deliberate choices occur when our habitual propensities clash and we are forced to make a decision between them. Generally, habit drives reason and choice, rather than the other way round.

This way of putting instinct first, habit second, and reason third is consistent with our understanding of human evolution. The instinct-habit-reason ordering is consistent with the sequence in which these emerged long ago in the evolution of our species. It is also consistent with the way in which they develop in each human individual, from infanthood to adulthood.

This evolutionary perspective on human agency is very different from the mind-first, or beliefs-first, perspectives that still dominate economics and much of social science.…

As George Lakoff frequently points out, mind-first is so 18th century.

Evonomics
Imagine Economics as an Evolutionary Science

Geoffrey M. Hodgson is research professor at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, England

David Ridley — Neoliberalism and its forgotten alternative

The debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey throughout the 1920s points to an alternative to the neoliberal world view, submerged in the subsequent war between capitalism and communism.

Open Democracy
Neoliberalism and its forgotten alternative

David Ridley | Lecturer in English and Journalism at Coventry University and is also currently studying for a Ph.D in Sociology at the University of Birmingham

Michael Staton — The Degree Is Doomed

Thank God. It's is a creativity killer. Academic credentialing grew out of the need to supply bureaucracies. Credentialing in the trades was through apprenticeship, a much more practical model. This doesn't apply only to higher education, either. John Dewey got this right in his model of progressive education as education for self-actualization and living a socially contributive life in an open society rather than as education for a job.

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network
The Degree Is Doomed
Michael Staton

Tim Johnson — Lady Credit

Economics is can be seen as being primarily concerned with managing resources when faced with scarcity; the maximisation of expected utility. An alternative view is that aspects of economics, particularly finance, are concerned with managing resources when faced with uncertainty. This distinction is not new, Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, argued that the suffering of mankind is not because they were expelled from the Garden of Eden into a world of scarcity but because they were expelled into a world of uncertainty. In the Garden of Eden humans had perfect knowledge, which was lost with the Fall, and it is the loss of this knowledge which is at the root of suffering: If we know what will happen we can manage scarcity

Magic, Maths, and Money
Lady Credit
Tim Johnson | Academic Fellow, Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics and the Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University

(h/t geerussell via email)

This post is really about the philosophy of economics set forth in terms of the history of economic thinking. Really insightful and lots of good info. It's not perfect, but very good. You will want to read this one.Yes, MMT and Chartalism make an appearance.