WHEN CONFUCIUS ENCOUNTERS JOHN DEWEY: A BRIEF HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF DEWEY'S VISIT TO CHINA.

This paper addresses John Dewey's experience in modem China. Our main purpose is an attempt to answer an important question: What motivated Dewey's Chinese students to introduce Dewey's educational thought to China? Part of an answer is derived by examining a more central question: How did Dewey's Chinese students find philosophical motivation from Confucianism in order to entertain Dewey's educational thought? By both privileging and utilizing Jane Roland Martin's (2011) educational theory of encounter, as a theoretical framework for addressing our question, we seek to illuminate the cross-cultural philosophical dynamic that took place between Dewey and his Chinese students. We borrow the concepts of "cultural stock" and "individual capacities" from Martin's theory to understand an encounter between Dewey's pragmatism and the elements of practicality in Confucianism during the early era of the Republic of China. Based on Martin's theory, this paper attempts to indicate that Dewey's Chinese students tried to adopt, transfer, and apply Dewey's pragmatism into Chinese culture, mostly because they were eager to find a "miraculous medicine" that would supposedly cure an ill Chinese society. In other words, Dewey's practical, utility-centered philosophical thoughts were very compatible with his Chinese students' cultural psychology stemming from traditional Confucianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]