In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education
  • Victor J. Rodriguez (bio)
Thomas S. Popkewitz , ed., Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005. 302 pp. ISBN 978-1-4039-6862-3, $ 69.95 (hbk.)

This edited volume of twelve essays, focusing on the dissemination of John Dewey's philosophy of education in eleven nations of Europe, Asia, and Latin America, breaks new ground on current John Dewey scholarship. Thomas S. Popkewitz's historical approach intends to de-essentialize Dewey's thought by identifying the various historical contexts that gave meaning to his ideas. The volume's major purpose is to situate Dewey studies within the scholarship of globalization and localization, tracing the distinct ways in which industrialization and nationalism around the world set conditions for the incorporation of modernizing ideologies of education and thus for the construction of modern selves. For this project, Popkewitz advances the notion of Dewey as a "conceptual persona," that is, as an embodiment of theses about the modern self, conceived in this case, as a "purposeful agent of change in a world filled with contingency."1 It was this imagined modern individual that stood as the model in nationalist projects to create the modern citizen. Popkewitz provides two conceptual themes to frame this global flow of ideas. As an "indigenous foreigner," Dewey provides ideas that become indigenous or natural to their new national contexts. As a "traveling library," Dewey offers a pedagogy that is integrated or serves to integrate dissimilar and at times opposing educational paradigms. At the core of this narrative of dissemination is the notion of the modern self as a model for citizenship.

The essays demonstrate that Dewey's pedagogy was integral to debates about citizenship and modernity in Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, Yugoslavia, [End Page 72] Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, China, and Japan during the turn of the century and the first three decades of the 20th century. In Western Europe, covered in the first section of this collection, a major social-cultural fault line reveals the first important juncture in the dissemination of John Dewey's philosophy of education: Nations that were not yet modern assimilated pragmatism on different grounds than those that were already industrialized. In industrialized nations, such as Switzerland and Belgium, this fault line acquired religious undertones stressing the psychology of Dewey's education. Calvinism's emphasis on the individual as an active agent provided a welcoming environment for a pragmatic pedagogy that stressed the psychological and genetic-functional aspects of education. According to Daniel Tröhler, in Switzerland, for example, this reduction "of the active citizen to the psychological activity of the child was in its core deeply Protestant."2 On the other hand, in Portugal, a Catholic nation, the social aspects of Deweyan pedagogy were privileged over the psychological: the insertion of production in the learning process and the idea that the child's life cycle mirrored civilization's ascent of man were the foundation for an educational philosophy whose major goal was to create a citizen for the future modern nation. As such, the idea of activity in Dewey was interpreted as the work of the homo faber. In all of Western Europe, though, the various pedagogies clustered around the New Education movement, which stressed learning for life, and served to integrate the educational discourses wherein Dewey's philosophy was located.3

In the second part of the book, dealing with Eastern Europe and the former Ottoman Empire, the desire to become modern—as in Portugal—defined the integration of Deweyan pedagogy into various projects to modernize the nation. In Yugoslavia, fear of German influence eased the reception of Dewey, who acted as a mediating figure who could "explicate certain German pedagogical theories"4 and integrate discourses predicated on the social goal of creating a unified "Slavic soul" as the foundation for the nation.5 As such, Dewey helped Yugoslav educators theorize work as an ordering principle of education for nation building. Yet this integration was not uncritical, as in the process, Slavic humanism was opposed to American materialism: Yugoslavs imported...

pdf