ABSTRACT
The analysis of the reception of Dewey’s pedagogy overseas has been mostly informed by binaries such as those of original/deviation and local/foreign that either measure the fidelity of overseas Deweyan project to a Deweyan original or that link Dewey unproblematically to the uses of his ideas in various overseas projects. I seek in this book to move beyond these conventions by offering two paradigms to interpret the appropriation of Dewey’s ideas in Mexico for the purposes of building a nation-state during the 1920s. I first look at the Deweyan project in Mexico as a supplement to Deweyan pragmatic thought in education whereby the interpretation and implementation of Dewey in Mexico both responded and added to absences in Dewey’s thought. Second, I look at the Mexican project as a form of asynchronous substitution whereby an education that responded historically to industrial capitalism as a historical process already in motion became in its Mexican appropriation a causal factor to generate an indigenous industrial nation. These paradigms explain, among many other issues, why the Mexican interlocutors of John Dewey rethought the process of socialized inquiry, a hallmark of the Dewey experimental schools at Chicago and Columbia, as consisting of two separate set of tasks: a project of socialización (socialization) informed mostly by Mexican history to create a homogeneous national society and a project to promote modern (and thus universal) cognitive practical skills to generate modernity from within the nation.
