Abstract: There are four periods in the centennial studies on John Dewey’s thought of education in China. The first period is the first thirty years in the 20th century when the main work was translating Dewey’s works and introducing Dewey’s thought into Chinese academic circles. Hu shih was the representative scholar in this period. The second period is from 1930 to 1949, in which the studies on Dewey’s thought were productive. There were kinds of researches from the perspective of libertarianism, from the theory of creative evolution or from the perspective of Marxism. However, the research has been split into two branches since 1949. This is the third period. In the People’s Republic of China, there had been full of criticism of Dewey’s thought of education from the ideology of MarxLeninism, which had no academic elements. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, the research became prosperous and TsuinChen Ou became the most outstanding scholar in the field. In the fourth period which began in 1980, the People’s Republic of China began to reevaluate Dewey’s thought of education and the studies began to revive. In the view of the research’s type of thought, the history of studies on Dewey’s educational thought in China is a course which started from experimentalism, and underwent to absolutism, and then returned to experimentalism.

Key words: John Dewey, thought of education, studies on John Dewey, experimentalism, absolutism