Philosophical pragmatists rarely receive credit for their contribution to virtue ethics. But perhaps they should. How did America's philosopher of democracy, John Dewey, and one of its most famous elder statesmen, Benjamin Franklin, advise troubled souls in search of moral improvement? According to James Campbell, Dewey and Franklin recommended…

In this article, Ira Harkavy points to the beliefs that education and schooling significantly determine the character of a society, and that higher education has broad societal impacts, including helping to shape the rest of the schooling system. It is this core idea that unites the work of Benjamin Franklin and Ernest Boyer and serves as the…

Much like traditional dyadic mentoring experiences, group mentorship has been practiced since time immemorial. Benjamin Franklin, for example, as a young entrepreneur created the Leather Apron Club, a group mentoring experience for a select group of Philadelphia tradesmen. Since the late 1990s, when group mentoring became a serious focus of…

This paper discusses the evolution of capitalism in British and American literature. The impact of capitalism on the lives of individuals has been well represented in both American and British literature throughout the centuries. The paper will discuss how seminal British authors such as Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and George…

In Benjamin Franklin's one fluid theory of electrification, ordinary unelectrified matter consisted of a matrix of matter suffused with a certain amount of "electrical fluid." Electrical effects were due to an excess or deficit of electrical fluid, hence the terms positive and negative. Before the development of a modern view of the…

This study examines the effects of an incentivized summer enrollment initiative on student persistence. In particular, we analyze how participation in summer classes (at least 3 credit hours) affect students' likelihood to reenroll in the fall semester at a two-year, private, technical college in Boston. The novel initiative, which provides…

What would Benjamin Franklin's Facebook page look like? Would he be "friends" with William Pierce, James Madison, or Alexander Hamilton? Would there have been a separate Facebook group for the framers of the Constitution, where they would have posted comments on the wall regarding the different stipulations that needed inclusion in the…

This quantitative study sought to determine if public and charter districts within Region One Education Service Center (ESC) are currently leveraging a change management framework. Furthermore, the goal was to determine if the change framework that is potentially being used is one that is effective based on the perspective of the respondents.…

This paper discusses the variety of ways in which The Bakken Museum has made use of replicas or simulations of historical instruments and experiments and demonstrations in education programs and exhibits for school children, families with children, and other museum audiences. Early efforts were stimulated in the mid-1980s by a collaboration with…

Background: "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."--Benjamin Franklin, writer, philosopher, politician. Having education initiatives for mass casualty incidents and disaster preparedness that are concise and organized is of high importance. This issue is pertinent to the midwestern medical center where this project took…

Last year, when students at Ridgecrest Intermediate School in Palos Verdes, California, were asked to name scientists, their answers--Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Bill Nye the Science Guy--reflected a common perception. Most of the leading scientists they came up with were white, male, or dead. Although women and people of…

Benjamin Franklin's famous published work "Of the Stilling of Waves by Means of Oil" is an extract from letters between Franklin, Brownrigg, and Farsih which presents the observations on chemical study.

While the remarkable accomplishments of Benjamin Franklin are unparalleled, the means of their attainment can be considered more accessible to ordinary people and not necessarily attributable to a special genius. The steady development of Franklin's knowledge and skills is traced in light of a new model of "dynamic learning," which is a method…

One would think that being the nation's only private, urban, two-year technical college might be a source of some notoriety, especially if that institution also traces its history back to a bequest in Benjamin Franklin's will. But even among New England's higher education community, Boston's Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology (BFIT) is a…

Benjamin Franklin was the first great American scientist. This book contains activities which are organized into six subjects that Benjamin Franklin investigated: observation and experimentation, meteorology, electricity, sound and music, paper and printing, and lenses and vision. At the end of each chapter is a list of resources and ideas. The…