ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the uses of Dewey’s ideas in Mexico before his appropriation in 1923 by the Mexican revolutionary government. During the early twentieth century, anarchists, socialists and radical teacher advocates of progressive education in Mexico invoked the name of John Dewey as an important pillar for a vision of a future Mexican society. Deweyan ideas circulated among radical pedagogues, sprouting in urban centers such as Mérida in Yucatán province, or in poor barrios of México City, where pockets of urban radicalism emerged concurrently with each other without the necessity of concerted action. Subsequently, self-professed disciples of Dewey founded the journal Educación, identifying Dewey as a member of the journal’s board of editors. Few if any historians have paid due attention to any of these uses of Deweyan education in Mexico during this time.1 This neglect may be due in part to the fact that most Mexican experiments with foreign education during that time withered or were successfully coopted by the national state. With scattered sources to encourage research and a common assumption that Dewey was no more than a name uttered on behalf of idealistic, quixotic, and perhaps contradictory experiments, scholars have neglected the intellectual foundations of the experiments that preceded the state project of the escuelas activas, the name given to the Mexican revolutionary experiment with Deweyan schools in the mid-1920s. Given this silence, the established interpretation of the role of Deweyan thought in Mexico holds that the popularity of Dewey’s ideas should be understood
purely in terms of its utility to a nationalist state desirous to establish social control over its population in order to consolidate capitalist relations.2
