This paper focuses on how Taneichi Kitazawa, a leading progressive education practitioner, received the concept of democracy, and reconsiders the meaning of democracy in Japanese progressive education, conventionally considered within the framework of early modern Japanese political ideology. Kitazawa, having gleaned the idea of "common interests" from John Dewey's concept of democracy, focused on the social quality of interest and advocated a classroom management theory. Seeing shared interests as the basic principle of group formation, his theory of classroom management indicates the significance of the classroom as a locus of "social life" and of "cooperative group projects." [This paper was originally published in Japanese, in "Kyoikugaku Kenkyu" ("The Japanese Journal of Educational Studies"), Vol. 84 No. 1 (2017). Translated by Nadezhda Murray.]