John Dewey’s lectures on education in China in the 1920s had an important influence on Chinese intellectual leaders and educators. This had a powerful effect on the modern movement of educational reform in China. However, Dewey’s prominence has overshadowed the work of Charles Peirce, whose pragmatism, educational philosophy, semiotic theory, and theory of formal rhetoric, underlies Dewey’s educational thought. Showing this theoretical link of Peirce with Dewey in the context of Chinese modern educational movement will help educational leaders to reconsider Dewey’s philosophy of education in light of Peirce. During his tenure at Johns Hopkins University, Peirce developed an active learning teaching pedagogy. This may have been inspired by his own education in chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, which adopted the model of Leibig’s experimental pedagogy as practiced in Germany. Testimonials from his students, such as Joseph Jastrow and Christine Ladd-Franklin verify this approach to his teaching. The result was significant published research in the areas of logic and physiology in partnership with his students. Dewey was also a student of Peirce’s at Johns Hopkins, and the similarity between Dewey’s models of active and experimental learning are striking. We show how Peirce’s pedagogy is related to his formal rhetoric, the third branch of his semiotic, considered to be a study of inquiry as such. We argue that Peirce’s pedagogy involves modeling this community of inquiry in the classroom. We end by showing how this semiotic process of learning can be translated into educational practice in the context of the Chinese system. We make a case that a study of Peirce’s thinking on education, within the framework of his semiotic theory, will contribute importantly to the Chinese educational movement, and also demonstrate the practical significance of Peirce’s work.