After the end of Nazi-fascism, one of the first and most important governmental actions in Italy had to be the reorganization of the public education system, in order to educate people for democracy and to create a national conscience. This essay aims to reconstruct the philosophical and pedagogical origins of the famous law proposed by Aldo Moro in 1958 on the teaching of civic education in schools. In Moro’s conception, the reform had to form a new man according to the new philosophical culture based on John Dewey’s social and political conception of pedagogy: education in the democratic era