Ways and Sideways of Emancipation: Dewey’s Reception in Different Political Eras of an Other-Than-Western Context

The aim of this chapter is to highlight how emancipatory educational ideas of one and the same author (here John Dewey) are always interpreted contextually, dependent on the dominant political climate of the nation state, its bodies and the actors that interpret it. This is unsurprising but it often escapes a related dialogue in global classrooms, led by the question of “How does our political context inform our reading of educational approaches?” To inform this question, the chapter analyzes the reception and impact of Dewey’ s pedagogical ideas in other than American and Western context—that of former Yugoslavia and Serbia in particular—starting from the translation of the Eduard Klapared’s introduction to Dewey in 1920. The main sample of research in the chapter are relevant pedagogical journals, textbooks for pedagogy and history of pedagogy, reviews and critiques that took Dewey’s pedagogical legacy as a subject of interpretation. Serbian political and educational context between 1920 and 2020 served as an example of how the two discourses in Dewey’s reception, prescriptive and liberal, interfere. Dewey’s reception in this area reflects all the complexity that arises in the encounter of the text with different ideological, social, individual and disciplinary lenses. Starting from the 90s, the revitalization of Dewey’s philosophy of education came through the efforts of researchers based in Serbia in the field of education to promote values of democracy, autonomy, critical inquiry, freedom and participation, the values suppressed by contemporary neoliberal educational policy.