Reading themselves through an icon: pedagogic episteme and functional differentiation as moulds for John Dewey’s reception in Spain, 1898–1939

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dewey’s selective and moulding reception in Spain (1898–1936) was determined by the academic and professional “episteme” as “externationalisation mould”. Dewey was translated by members of the bourgeois-reformist Institución Libre de Enseñanza mainly after 1925, as his thought didn’t fit in their “episteme ” and political project. Searching for justification, they construed him as one of them, an Ideal-Realist, syncretising Pragmatism with Spiritualism- Vitalism, and rejecting his Naturalism, social definition of morality and communitarian-participative democracy as contrary to elitist nationalising regeneration. Dewey became a prestige brand and adverecundiam argument for supporting different stances. The failure of top-down regeneration and the problems of the extension of schooling, and pedagogic and scientific institutionalisation made possible a deeper reception. Socialist and teachers’ self-educational participative practices and professionalisation allowed practitioners to understand Dewey. Practitioners used him to defend a socialising and active-cooperative education through the project method, and the republican school, as remedies against the central Spanish social aetiology, individualism. Dewey gained specific illocutionary meanings: school teachers used him to claim intellectual independence from higher pedagogy. However, teachers, as academics, maintained anthropological and social-educational dualism and didn’t fully embrace Naturalism or a communitarian democratic-participative school that would have questioned their role as community reformers.