Much has been published in recent decades on Dewey’s intellectual legacy, in the field of education and in other areas. Beyond the understandable interest held by Dewey’s work itself, the sheer intensity of this publishing comeback is nevertheless surprising. The case of Democracy and Education (MW 9: 3-370) and this past year’s (excessive?) celebration of its centennial publication is especially relevant if we take Dewey’s work as a whole. When the book was published in 1906, it immediately hit a chord internationally, and it was strangely able to be used in support of different pedagogical and political views of education in different latitudes and historical contexts. In the midst of waves of social and education reforms in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars, Dewey’s works seemed to fit in very well with the spirit behind the new proposals for reforms. Dewey himself directly collaborated on spreading his ideas by traveling the world and giving courses in various countries, accepting invitations to give lectures and meeting with various governments in different places around the world. Dewey once said that his character was variable and sensible to circumstances, comparing himself with a chameleon. But what sort of figure did he eventually become when he visited all these countries? Take for example his quite unique journey to China (Del Castillo, 2011a), was he an educational expert, a counselor, a mediator or an interpreter? (Del Castillo & Thoilliez, 2016). One hundred years after Democracy and Education was originally published, here we are again, living in the middle of a new and bigger wave of educational reforms all over the world. Anyone following public education discussions would likely agree that we are now living in a kind of collective educational anxiety, caused among other forces by the international assessment programs and their heavily publicized league-tables of students’ performance. I am particularly thinking of the PISA initiative run by the international organization OECD. Since 2000 international league-tables from PISA are generating globalized and massive movements of educational system reforms that have become greater than any other previous pedagogical idea in the history of education. Should we not be a bit more suspicious of it? How are international organizations such as OECD taking over educational politics? What does this mean for the present and the future of our democracies? Dewey held that problems with democracy and “eclipsing of the public sphere” could be counteracted by proposing new forms of democratic action that were more active and committed to participation in local communities, capable of sustaining and revitalizing the promise of democracy. Following Bernstein’s understanding (2010, p. 87), despite the fact that the problems pointed out by Dewey still exist today, a few facts remain clear. One, his analysis of the institutions (the existing ones as well as the new ones in the future) was insufficient and lacked specificity; second, even though his radical democracy involved fundamental changes in economic underpinnings, it did not provide the details on his proposed alternative inclusive plan; and third, he was wrong in his assessment of how resistant some forces could be to the attempts at political and education reforms such as the ones advocated by Dewey. 

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