This paper intents to analyze the influence of John Dewey’s ideas in the movement that defended the educationl renovation in Brazil at the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s. For this, it explains two trends of that movement: the first is described by the metaphor of industrial or mechanical efficiency, whose emphasis was in the power derived from the disciplinary idea of progress, which was embedded in the process of rationalization of the social relations submitted by a factory (...) model; the second, developed by influence of Dewey, is characterized by a project of democratization of society and school that prevented the individual massification and the adoption of the rationalizing model inspired by the factory without any criticism. When Dewey was put in the center of the debate on political, pedagogical and social goals of the Brazilian New School, he was called to introduce a series of concepts that helped to find the balance between the respect for individuality and the observation of the social needs. (shrink)

Did John Dewey’s ‘new philosophy of education’ really try to dissolve the whole block of tradition or is his debt namely to educational core-concepts of neo-humanism deeper than he was prepared to acknowledge? After some general remarks on the process of reception as productive re-adaptation and its implication for historiography I will deal with Dewey’s own contexts that shape the interpretative grid through which he receives the tradition. Two case studies attempt to illustrate both continuity and discontinuity with a specific (...) part of this tradition, namely two critical perspectives within German neo-humanism: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Friedrich Herbart. (shrink)