80th Anniversary of Soka Education Celebrated

Oct 24, 2010 

At Tohoku University’s Centennial Hall in Sendai

Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the founding of Soka Education, the Soka Gakkai Education Department hosted its 33rd “All Japan Rally on Practical Application of Humanistic Education” at Tohoku University’s Centennial Hall in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, on October 24. Over 1,200 educators and guests attended the event, which was cosponsored by the Makiguchi Foundation for Education.

In a message to participants, Soka Schools founder SGI President Daisaku Ikeda shared his admiration for educators who apply “value-creating education,” enumerated by the first president of Soka Gakkai, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. Mr. Ikeda emphasized that helping young people to grow and develop is the greatest mission in life and shared his vision that educators would, through a united effort, impart hope to society where people suffer from a myriad of problems.

Several educators shared their classroom experiences and how enthusiasm and passion are key in fostering students’ potential and depth of spirit. In response, Yoshikichi Abe, vice president of Miyagi University of Education, emphasized that the teachers’ success resulted from their daily efforts to create innovative lessons and actively engage in building relationships with students, parents and the community.

[Adapted from an article in the October 25, 2010, issue of the Seikyo Shimbun, Soka Gakkai, Japan; photo courtesy of Seikyo Shimbun]

New Human Revolution, Volume 7

In July 2010 the Mens Division is reading The New Human Revolution, Volume 7. The first chapter is entitled “The Flower of Culture.” It begins with a description of the first Education Department National Convention on August 1, 1962. The Education Department had been formed on May 3, 1961, which was the first anniversary of President Ikeda’s inauguration. Prior to the meeting he had written an editorial about education in Daibyakurenge.

“From ancient times to the present, in every nation and civilization around the world, history has clerly shown us that education determines the prosperity or decline of a people and a nation. The effects of education reveal themselves only twenty or thirty years after. Thus education determines the success or failure of the next generation…”

Where the Bar Ought to Be

Deborah Kenny talks a lot about passion — the passion for teaching, for reading and for learning. She has it. She wants all of her teachers to have it. Above all, she wants her students to have it.

Ms. Kenny has created three phenomenally successful charter schools in Harlem and is in the process of creating more. She’s gotten a great deal of national attention. But for all the talk about improving schools in this country, she thinks we tend to miss the point more often than not.

There is an overemphasis on “the program elements,” she said, “things like curriculum and class size and school size and the longer day.”

She understood in 2001, when she was planning the first of the schools that have come to be known as the Harlem Village Academies, that none of those program elements were nearly as important as the quality of the teaching in the schools.

“If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well,” she said, “that was just 100 times more important than anything else.”

This emphasis on program elements is one of the main reasons it has been so difficult to repeat the successes of outstanding schools. As Ms. Kenny put it, “They were trying to replicate programs instead of trying to develop people.”
It’s not that the program elements are unimportant.

When I visited a Harlem Village Academy middle school on First Avenue, the first thing I noticed was an apparent paradox: There was a great deal of energy and excitement in the school but not much noise, not even when children were changing classes. The school day is longer. The curriculum is carefully thought out. And discipline is obviously important. Youngsters are not allowed to make fun of one another. And there is no fighting.

When I asked one boy why there were no fights in the school, he replied, “Because it’s not allowed.”

Ms. Kenny’s point is that these programmatic, structural elements in the schools are just the starting points, the foundation that supports the essential mission of any school: to teach.
“I became obsessed with how to develop great teachers,” she said.

The first step in that complex, difficult process is to create a school environment that has standards high enough and challenging enough to appeal to very good people. “You put all of your focus on finding great people,” said Ms. Kenny, “and you establish a culture that helps them constantly learn and grow and become better at what they do. You have to provide a community in the school that supports and respects teachers. And you have to give them the kind of freedom that allows their passion for teaching to flourish.

“We’ve created a culture that brings out the passion of the teachers and they bring out the passion of the kids.”

By BOB HERBERT The New York Times 2010

Scholar’s School Reform U-Turn

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles. Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.

Dr. Ravitch is finding many supporters. She told school superintendents at a convention in Phoenix last month that the United States’ educational policies were ill-conceived, compared with those in nations with the best-performing schools.

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

The superintendents gave Dr. Ravitch a standing ovation.
“We totally agreed with what she had to say,” said Eugene G. White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. “We were amazed to see that she’d changed her tune.”

By SAM DILLON The New York Times 2010

Formation of the Educators’ Conference ion June 23, 1953

From The Human Revolution, Vol. 7, “Under the Wings” pp 902-3

Toda decided to form this group to maintain the theory of value-creating education and the principle of educational guidance, the legacy left by his mentor, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. The coming autumn would see his tenth memorial. The Educators’ Club established by Makiguchi had long since been dissolved. Although Toda was busy leading the surging march of propagation, not a day passed that he didn’t remember his deceased mentor. He had been studying ways of training successors to Makiguchi’s theories, people who would eventually make them known to the world.

“This year we shall observe Mr. Makiguchi tenth memorial,” Toda said at the inaugural meeting. “In commemoration, I’m planning to publish his philosophy of value in book form and send copies to colleges and universities throughout the nation. Whatever the immediate response it may receive, thirty years or fifty years from now it will certainly strike many people with wonder and admiration. Now is the time to invite the public to judge the value of his doctrine. All theories, be they pedagogical or sociological, are ultimately undergirded by the philosophy of value. I want you to do all you can to bequeath Mr. Makiguchi’s teaching to posterity.

“If even only one person tackles this task, the time will come when more and more people will accept our mentor’s theory. If I were to die today there would be no one to inherit and transmit it. It has been more than twenty years since I left the educational world, but I will try to impart all my knowledge to you so that we can conduct research together. I am convinced that the philosophy of value will spread throughout the world. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s The Philosophy of Value was published in the autumn and copies presented to every college and university in Japan.

Problems of Education: Enhancing a Grasp of Life

“A proper grasp of life is the key to dispelling the darkness shrouding contemporary society–manifested in such problems as environmental pollution, government that is detached from the people and the sorry state of education-and establishing a society that respects human life.”
Daisaku Ikeda, The New Human Revolution, Volume 17, Page 5

2009 Peace Proposal Cites Educator Makiguchi’s “Humanitarian Competition”

Quoted from SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s 2009 Peace Proposal:
“The time has come for a new way of thinking, for a paradigm shift that will reach the very foundation of human civilization. . .
In this connection, I would like to explore certain ideas set out by the founding president of the Soka Gakkai, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, in his 1903 work The Geography of Human Life . . . Specifically, I would like to explore the possibilities to be found in his idea of “humanitarian competition.”

In this work, Makiguchi surveys the grand flow of human history and identifies the forms of competition that have prevailed in different periods: military, political and economic. He concludes with a call for us to set our sights on the goal of establishing “humanitarian competition” as the prevailing ethos of the era–competition to contribute the most to society.

This is because the values encapsulated within socialism in order to remove the ills of capitalism–justice and equality, for example–whether applied in the domestic or international arena, are indeed rooted in an underlying humanism. These ideals cannot be allowed to perish along with the systemic failure of communism.

The question remains then as to why, if socialism is informed with correct principles, it has generally failed as a system. It is valuable to reference Makiguchi’s insight: “Whether in natural or human affairs, when free competition is hampered, this results in stagnation, stasis and regression.” The failure of socialism can be attributed to the failure to take the value of competition as a source of energy and vitality in human society adequately into account.
Herein lies the value of humanitatian competition. As a concept, it allows us to first directly confront the reality of competition while ensuring that it is conducted firmly on the basis of human values, thus bringing forth a synergistic reaction between the values of humanitarian concerns and competitive energies.
In past proposals over the decades I have urged that our approach to universal perspectives and principles cannot be external and transcendent, but must be immanent and internalized. Here also, Makiguchi’s superlative farsightedness in The Geography of Human Life merits our careful attention:

“The actualities of vast stretches of the earth are generally observable in a tiny patch of land. In that sense, the outlines of the vast and complex phenomena seen in the geography of the entire world can be explained using the examples of a single town or village in an isolated region.”

When Makiguchi speaks of “the geography of human life,” this is obviously not limited to geography in the narrow sense, but includes the concrete aspects of the full scope of human activities, including politics, economics, society, religion, etc.

In other words, rather than making the great leap to the “vast and complex phenomena” of life, we should start from the concrete realities of the “tiny patch of land” where we are now. It is only by paying close and continuous attention to those realities that we can gain a meaningful appreciation of larger phenomena. For someone with this kind of imaginative power directed toward the reality of daily life, not only intimate friends but even the inhabitants of distant lands can be experienced as “neighbors.”  ( end of quotes from the Peace Proposal )

As teachers, let’s focus on our “tiny patch of land”, in most cases our classrooms, and strive to employ this new paradigm. Our dynamic and heartfelt efforts will contribute to the greater good of all.

Submitted by Art Hoover  SGI-USA Educators Division Co-Leader

Preeminent Role of the Teacher in Schools

From President Ikeda:
Delivered at Teachers College, Columbia University, June 13, 1996

http://www.daisakuikeda.org/

“It is my abiding conviction that it is the teacher dedicated to serving students, and not the inanimate facility, that makes a school… Students’ lives are not changed by lectures, but by people. For this reason, interactions between students and teachers are of the greatest importance. We learn from people and it is for this reason that the humanity of the teacher represents the core of the educational experience.”

And from Bill Gates www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter 1/09
“One of the key things these schools have done is to help their teachers be more effective in the classroom. It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him or her assigned to a great teacher than a great school.”

2003 Message to Soka Educators

Daisaku Ikeda

July 2003

To all the members of the Academic and Educators Divisions: My sincere congratulations on your conference! I deeply appreciate your day-and-night dedication to the sacred work of education.

President Makiguchi once said, “All schools and teachers exist for students.” A good teacher is the most important educational element for students. The basis of every undertaking is to generate and nurture people of great character. A direct, life-to-life association is essential to revitalize a sense of humanity in people. I hope that each of you, challenging yourself to revolutionize your life-condition, pray first for the happiness and growth of children and young people.

A truly great person is someone who makes everybody great and can respect everyone. The true spirit of Buddhism pulsates in your behavior as a human being. The life of Buddhism shines in the splendor of your character. It is my hope that you, with your strong, confident prayers, fully develop your life force and overcome your small ego, fostering many precious capable leaders who will be instrumental in building peace for America and the world.

Nichiren Daishonin writes, “This sutra spreads widely due to the protection of Bodhisattva Universal Worthy” (Gosho Zenshu, p. 780). I hope that each of you, just like Bodhisattva Universal Worthy, will open the gate of kosen-rufu widely through peace, culture and education.

You, who have a vital mission, are all so important to me. I am praying every day with all my heart for your continued good health and successful endeavors.

2002 Message to Soka Educators

Daisaku Ikeda

June 20, 2002

To the members of the Academic Division and Educators Division of the SGI-USA, who shoulder responsibility for our great Soka cultural and educational movement in the United States, I offer my sincere congratulations on the holding of your FNCC conference.

I understand that today some 110 representatives have gathered from across the United States. I truly appreciate all of your consistent, strenuous efforts and struggles.

The Lotus Sutra speaks of “bravely and vigorously exerting oneself.” With faith as your basis, please continue to move with energy and courage while giving full play to your knowledge and intellect for the sake of the people’s happiness and for the sake of your society’s fortune and prosperity. Your growth and happiness exist in such efforts. As you persevere with pure and unremitting faith, please remember one point throughout your lives–to dedicate yourselves to serving the people.

Each of you has a precious and praiseworthy mission. With strong prayer and courageous action, please develop and expand your network of wisdom. When you do so, a grand and dignified flower of Soka culture will blossom gloriously in American and the world. Please be firmly convinced that advancing cheerfully and vigorously together with ordinary people amid the “garden of Soka” accords with true happiness in life, and take the lead again today in conducting courageous and hope-filled dialogue.

I am sending daimoku earnestly each day that you all may live cheerful lives of victory and health.