This text starts with a characterization in which the Brazilian New School movement is considered as the disseminator of the introduction of scientific procedures in the pedagogical field, as if education should be subordinated to the rules of thought and to the findings of science. The text then shows that this characterization describes only one of the trends among the renewed educational ideas. Another idea, this one heavily influenced by the thinking of North-American philosopher and educator John Dewey, offers very different directions. The paper then analyzes some articles published in the fifties by the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos, a journal published by the National Institute of Pedagogical Studies (INEP). Such articles, written by Anísio Teixeira, João Roberto Moreira, and Luiz Alves de Mattos amongst others, translate the renewed educational ideas of the period and express the conceptions based on John Dewey’s ideas. The themes discussed by those Brazilian educators are grouped according to the following categories: democracy, freedom, socio-educational research, and educational planning. Along the analysis performed here it has been noted that the authors express different visions of the same thinker - John Dewey. This fact can be understood using the concept of "recontextualization", proposed by Basil Bernstein, according to whom the theories or philosophical conceptions suffer modifications, sometimes fundamental, as they are transformed in pedagogical discourses. At the same that this work intends to contribute to a better understanding of the presence of Dewey’s thinking in Brazil, it also points to the need of developing deeper studies about the processes of recontextualization in the educational field.
Brazilian education; Pragmatism; New School; John Dewey