Ambedkar drew directly from Dewey’s Democracy and Education for AoC

Evidence

Ambedkar is echoing the words of Dewey. According to Mukherjee (2009, 347): “So deeply embedded is Dewey’s thought in Ambedkar’s consciousness that quite often his words flow through Ambedkar’s discourse without quotation marks.” She also notes “how Ambedkar culled sentences from Democracy and Education to describe his version of the ideal society” (351). Ambedkar expresses his debt to Dewey in section 25.4 of AoC. The relevant paragraph from Dewey’s Democracy and Education, quoted by Mukherjee, reads: “A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents” (364). — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1064

Categorization

• XREF: The uncredited Dewey borrowings parallel how AoC’s egalitarian ideal society is built on Deweyan democratic education — links to an anti-caste critique grounded in Western pragmatism.