John Dewey e le frontiere educativo-democratiche dell’Asia (1918-1921)

In 1919 the American philosopher and educator John Dewey was invited to Asia to hold some conferences in Japan and China, a country where he stayed for over two years. The trip, initially thought of as leisure, was a formidable experience for Dewey and a means of learning about the educational models of the two countries, as well as disseminating his philosophical-pedagogical theories outside the United States. The essay proposes an analysis of Dewey’s experience starting from the Japanese conferences and the lessons held in Beijing – published for the first time in Italy only in 2017 – also through an unpublished source such as letters to his children never translated into Italian. This approach is functional in outlining the predominant traits of how Dewey’s theories were received and what the American pedagogist himself was able to draw from the Asian experience.