The Dewey-Soka Heritage and the Future of Education

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Dewey-Soka Heritage and the Future of Education (Jason Goulah, Gonzalo Obelleiro, and Jim Garrison)
• The Dewey Heritage
• The sōka/Soka Heritage
• Scholarly Engagement with the Dewey-Soka Heritage
• This Volume
• Spirituality, Religion, and Education
• Global Citizenship, Hope, and the Democratic Life
• Praxis, Curriculum, and the Dewey-Soka Heritage
• Notes
• References
• Prologue: Makiguchi Tsunesaburō and John Dewey (Takao Ito
• Dewey in Makiguchi’s Early Works
• Dewey in Makiguchi’s Middle Works
• Dewey in Makiguchi’s Late Works
• Notes
• References
• Part I: Spirituality, Religion, and Education
• 1. Uncommon Faiths: John Dewey and Makiguchi Tsunesaburō’s Recasting of “Religion” (Andrew Gebert)
• “Religion” as a Modern Category of Experience
• The Japanese Importation of “Religion”
• Makiguchi’s Early Views of Religion
• Makiguchi’s Embrace of Nichiren
• Dewey’s A Common Faith
• Makiguchi’s “Supra-Religious”
• A Human Faith
• Postscript
• Notes
• References
• 2. Buddhist Humanism and Spiritual Democracy (Steven C. Rockefeller)
• Humanism
• Humanism and Religion
• Religious Experience and the Ethical Ideal
• Notes
• References
• 3. Makiguchi, Ikeda, and Dewey: Geography as a Response to Spiritual Nihilism (Jim Garrison)
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• References
• 4. The Dharma of Lovingkindness and Compassion: Adding Women’s Voices to the Dewey-Soka Conversation (Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon)
• Current Conditions
• Ayya Khema
• The Dharma of Compassion, the Buddha Nature (tathagata-garbha)
• Nel Noddings
• Ann Diller
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• 5. Teacher Selfhood and the Education of the Global Citizen (Isabel Nuñez)
• Notes
• References
• Part II: Global Citizenship, Hope, and the Democratic Life
• 6. Ikeda Daisaku and African American Pragmatism: Race, Identity, Justice, and Cosmopolitan Becoming in the Dewey-Soka Heritage (Jason Goulah)
• Ikeda Daisaku and Race in America
• Ikeda on Race, “the Religious,” and the Justice of Spiritual Independence
• Ikeda on Race and the Bodhisattva as True Identity
• Toward a Cosmopolitan Becoming
• Notes
• References
• 7. A Growing Crisis in Education (and Some Bright Spots) (Larry A. Hickman)
• A Growing Crisis
• Food Insecurity as an Impediment to Learning
• Decline of Funds for State-supported Higher Education
• The Rise of Negative Public Opinion Regarding Higher Education
• Capture of Public Funds by For-Profit Educational Institutions
• Lack of Oversight of For-Profit Educational Institutions
• K-12 and Accountability
• Low Pay and Attacks on Tenure
• The Massive Ed-Tech Testing Business
• The Rise of Adjunct (Contingent) Faculty
• Some Bright Spots
• The Importance of Coordinated Action to Change Defective Policies
• Choosing a Sound Educational Philosophy: Dewey and Ikeda
• An Example of Sensitive and Dedicating Teaching
• Author’s Note
• References
• 8. Creating Value, Creative Democracy: Re-envisioning Civic Learning and Life in Dark Times (Ruthanne Kurth-Schai)
• Divided in Darkness: Conspiring toward Delusion and Despair
• Finding Our Way: Creating Value, Creative Democracy
• Creating Value
• Creative Democracy
• Cultivating Unique Potential: Re-envisioning Civic Learning
• Along Challenging Paths: Re-envisioning Civic Pedagogy and Practice
• Pedagogies of Enlightenment
• Pedagogies of Empowerment
• Towards the Light in the Distance: A Call to Action
• Editors’ Note
• References
• 9. The Dewey-Soka Heritage: An East~West Convergence of Philosophies of Hope (Ming Fang He)
• Dewey’s Democratic Ideal, Associated Living, and Unity in Variety
• Makiguchi’s Geography of Human Life and Cooperative Living for Value Creation
• Ikeda’s Human Revolution and Value Creation through Creative Coexistence
• The Dewey-Soka Heritage and East~West Philosophies of Hope
• Notes
• References
• 10. Makiguchi and Dewey on Truth, Knowledge, and Value (Gonzalo Obelleiro)
• Dewey’s Critique of the Spectator Theory of Knowledge
• Dewey’s Instrumentalism: A Participant Perspective
• Makiguchi on Facticity and Value
• Three Responses
• Notes
• References
• Part III: Praxis, Curriculum, and the Dewey-Soka Heritage
• 11. Assessment for Growth and Value Creation in the Dewey-Soka Heritage (Nozomi Inukai and Alexandra I. Cruz)
• The “How” of Assessment
• The “What” of Assessment
• Value-Creative Assessment
• References
• 12. Embracing the Dewey-Soka Heritage in Education Research: Relational, Dialogical, and Narrative Ways of Knowing and Being (Julie Nagashima and Melissa Riley Bradford)
• Reimagining Methodologies that Draw on Alternative Inquiry Paradigms
• Theoretical Framework: A Buddhist Humanist Inquiry Paradigm
• Methodology: A Participatory Paradigm and Value-Creative, Dialogic/Narrative Inquiry
• Findings: A Dialogue on Relational Methodologies
• Creating Value with Methodological Choices
• Methodological Implications: Meaning Making through Relationships in Dialogue and Storytelling
• Implications: Learning from Value-Creative Research and Practice
• Relational Methodologies and Ethics
• Trustworthiness
• Criteria for Value-Creative Dialogic-Narrative Inquiry
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• 13. The Dewey-Soka Heritage as a Lens for the American Experience (C. Gregg Jorgensen)
• The Dewey-Soka Heritage
• The American Experience Course: Connections to Freedom of Mind and Leadership
• The Role of Dialogue
• Experience as a Concept
• Creativity as Value Creation and Testing “Truth” as Experience
• Music as Transformative Experience and Value Creation
• Science as Value Creation
• Peace Education as Value Creation
• Conclusion – Value Creation Revisited
• References
• 14. Striving to Create Curriculum by Embodying the Educational Spirit of John Dewey and the Founders of the Soka Heritage (William H. Schubert)
• Questions from Themes of the Dewey-Soka Heritage
• (1) Do educators help learners reconstruct meanings and create value that guides their lives?
• (2) How can collegiate schooling embrace value creation and reconstruction of meanings more fully?
• (3) How do we teach so students continue learning from experience?
• (4) Can Dewey’s reconstruction of experience be brought to elementary school students?
• (5) Do we engage students in participatory democracy and dialogue?
• (6) Can we create value that guides education experience to continuously reconstruct meaning based on love that nourishes justice?
• References
• About the Contributors
• Index

Jason Goulah / Gonzalo Obelleiro / Jim Garrison (eds.)

The Dewey-Soka Heritage and
the Future of Education

New York · Berlin · Bruxelles · Chennai · Lausanne · Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goulah, Jason editor | Obelleiro, Gonzalo, 1978- editor | Garrison, James W., 1949- editor

Title: The Dewey-Soka heritage and the future of education / Edited by Jason Goulah, Gonzalo Obelleiro, Jim Garrison.

Description: New York : Peter Lang, [2025] | Series: Ikeda/Soka Studies in Education ; Vol 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024444478 (print) | LCCN 2024059666 (ebook) | ISBN 9783034352031 paperback | ISBN 9783034352017 pdf | ISBN 9783034352024 epub

Subjects: LCSH: Education--Aims and objectives | Ikeda, Daisaku | Education--Japan--Philosophy | Dewey, John, 1859-1952--Views on education | Education--Philosophy

Classification: LCC LB41 .D445 2025 (print) | LCC LB41 (ebook) | DDC 370.1--dc23/eng/20250214

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024444478

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024059666

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover image: © Gonzalo Obelleiro

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISBN 978-3-0343-5203-1 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-0343-5201-7 (E-PDF)

ISBN 978-3-0343-5202-4 (E-PUB)

DOI 10.3726/b22492

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne, Switzerland

Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA

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All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION
The Dewey-Soka Heritage and the Future of Education

Jason Goulah, Gonzalo Obelleiro, and Jim Garrison

PROLOGUE
Makiguchi Tsunesaburō and John Dewey

Takao Ito

PART I
Spirituality, Religion, and Education

1. Uncommon Faiths: John Dewey and Makiguchi Tsunesaburō’s Recasting of “Religion”

Andrew Gebert

2. Buddhist Humanism and Spiritual Democracy

Steven C. Rockefeller

3. Makiguchi, Ikeda, and Dewey: Geography as a Response to Spiritual Nihilism

Jim Garrison

4. The Dharma of Lovingkindness and Compassion: Adding Women’s Voices to the Dewey-Soka Conversation

Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon

5. Teacher Selfhood and the Education of the Global Citizen

Isabel Nuñez

PART II
Global Citizenship, Hope, and the Democratic Life

6. Ikeda Daisaku and African American Pragmatism: Race, Identity, Justice, and Cosmopolitan Becoming in the Dewey-Soka Heritage

Jason Goulah

7. A Growing Crisis in Education (and Some Bright Spots)

Larry A. Hickman

8. Creating Value, Creative Democracy: Re-envisioning Civic Learning and Life in Dark Times

Ruthanne Kurth-Schai

9. The Dewey-Soka Heritage: An East~West Convergence of Philosophies of Hope

Ming Fang He

10. Makiguchi and Dewey on Truth, Knowledge, and Value

Gonzalo Obelleiro

PART III
Praxis, Curriculum, and the Dewey-Soka Heritage

11. Assessment for Growth and Value Creation in the Dewey-Soka Heritage

Nozomi Inukai and Alexandra I. Cruz

12. Embracing the Dewey-Soka Heritage in Education Research: Relational, Dialogical, and Narrative Ways of Knowing and Being

Julie Nagashima and Melissa Riley Bradford

13. The Dewey-Soka Heritage as a Lens for the American Experience

C. Gregg Jorgensen

14. Striving to Create Curriculum by Embodying the Educational Spirit of John Dewey and the Founders of the Soka Heritage

William H. Schubert

About the Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

We have many people to thank for the realization of this book. First, we must express our sincere gratitude to the fourteen contributors not only for their wonderful chapters but also for their unparalleled patience and understanding as this book was in progress. It took more than five years for the book to come to fruition as we experienced multiple unforeseen interruptions, including from the covid pandemic. Despite these interruptions, the contributors remained positive, supportive, and fully committed to the project. In many ways, though, this volume is better for these interruptions as new scholarship and translations in the field of Ikeda/Soka studies became available during that time and multiple chapters were updated to reflect important developments in this growing international field.

Second, it has been a great pleasure to work with Peter Lang and the excellent team there who have brought the project to print. Acquisitions editor Dani Green saw the value not only in a volume on the intellectual heritage and future implications of the philosophies and practices of John Dewey, Makiguchi Tsunesaburō, Toda Jōsei, and Ikeda Daisaku, but also in the necessity of launching an entire series in Ikeda/Soka Studies in Education. We thank her for her kindness and early work on this volume. We also owe especial thanks to acquisitions editor Alison Jefferson for continuing the project and for her meaningful support as we prepared the manuscript. Alison and the amazing staff at Peter Lang, including Joshua Charles in Editorial Services and the book’s project manager, G. Sankar, have been exceptional behind the scenes in the various aspects of production and marketing.

Peter Lang is to be commended for its foresight in launching this series in Ikeda/Soka Studies in Education. We are thrilled this volume inaugurates the series and we thank series editors Jason Goulah and Awad Ibrahim for the opportunity and their support.

We also thank the blind reviewers for their helpful and thoughtful comments, questions, and recommendations, Virginia Benson for connecting us with certain contributors in the book’s planning stages, and Gonzalo Obelleiro for designing the book’s beautiful cover. In addition to being a gifted scholar, Gonzalo is a talented graphic designer by training and kindly donated his work to this project.

This book would not have been possible without the guidance and support of the DePaul University Institute for Daisaku Ikeda Studies in Education. Bolstered by its research, translations, professional development, forums and international conferences, and degree and credential programs in Value-Creating Education for Global Citizenship, the Institute has distinguished itself within the global academy as a leading center for scholarship and educator preparation in the fields of Ikeda/Soka Studies in Education and Value-Creating Education for Global Citizenship. Institute doctoral fellows Ritsuko Rita and Toko Itaya provided assistance locating primary and secondary texts for this project. We also thank Jason Goulah, Nozomi Inukai, and Andrew Gebert for providing, under the Institute’s auspices, multiple translations, including of passages from Makiguchi’s primary works quoted in chapters in this volume.

We thank Jessica Heybach and David Hansen for their thoughtful and supportive endorsements of this book and of our work leading up to it. And we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge Nel Noddings, who agreed but was unable to write the foreword for this book before her passing in August 2022. Nel was a dear friend and colleague and introduced many to the heritage of thought from Makiguchi, Toda, and Ikeda. In addition to recognizing Makiguchi’s contributions to happiness in her book Happiness and Education and noting the work of the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning and Dialogue in her book Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War, she, together with David Hansen, Larry Hickman, Jim Garrison, and Ann Diller, served for many years as a founding member of the advisory board for the Ikeda Center’s Education Fellows program for emerging scholars in Ikeda/Soka Studies in Education, including four whose chapters are included in this volume.

We also wish to thank C. Gregg Jorgensen in memoriam for his kindness, friendship, and collegiality. We thank his partner, Diane Schlough, for her support and patience as we brought Gregg’s chapter to publication after his passing.

We owe our deepest appreciation to our spouses Maimi, Rita, and Elaine for their constant support, understanding, and encouragement not only during this project but in all our efforts.

Finally, we owe a special debt of gratitude to Daisaku Ikeda, not only for his life’s work and efforts to keep those of Messrs. Makiguchi and Toda alive and vibrant and in dialogue with Dewey’s, but also for the personal impact he and his work have had on each of us. We reported this book to Mr. Ikeda’s office at multiple points during its progress and wish we could have shared the final product with him before his passing in November 2023.

Jason Goulah, Gonzalo Obelleiro, and Jim Garrison

INTRODUCTION The Dewey-Soka Heritage and the Future of Education Jason Goulah, Gonzalo Obelleiro, and Jim Garrison

This book explores what we call the “Dewey-Soka heritage” of education. By Dewey-Soka heritage we mean the East-West ecology of thought and practice present in and inspired by the educational perspectives of American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) and the Japanese progenitors of sōka, or “value-creating,” approaches to life and education and the Soka organizations and institutions they advanced embodying and memorializing these in name and ethos: Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (1871–1944), Toda Jōsei (1900–1958), and Ikeda Daisaku (1928–2023)¹. The specific wording of the title is deliberate. “Heritage” connotes a scope that transcends the ideas of Dewey, Makiguchi, Toda, and Ikeda, embracing the continuing legacy of their educational philosophies in the work of contemporary scholars and educators. “Dewey–Soka” connotes not only the separate legacies of both philosophical traditions but underscores the emergence of educational scholarship and practice that flows from the various points of contact between the traditions. Encounters across difference always yield moments of both convergence and divergence. What is remarkable in the various contributions featured in this volume is a pattern of creative tension and possibility emerging from ideas of distant origin coming together to address contemporary problems.

The timing of this publication is significant. The year 2019 marked the 100^th anniversary of Dewey’s travels to Japan (Dewey, 1921/1983; Dewey & Dewey, 1920) and 2025 marks the 95^th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Makiguchi’s four-volume work, Sōka kyōikugaku taikei (The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy; Makiguchi, 1930–1934/1981–1996, vols. 5 & 6), the founding text of the heritage of thought and practice connecting Makiguchi, Toda, and Ikeda. Perhaps more important, the timing is significant because the current moment has evidenced noteworthy developments and tensions in both Dewey and Soka studies in education, as well as a renewed relevance of Deweyan and value-creating approaches to global citizenship, democracy, social justice, and other commitments in the wake of threats to democracy, the global rise of nationalism, and the politicized Othering of linguistically, racially, and culturally marginalized groups.

The Dewey Heritage

John Dewey lived a long life at a time of rapid and deep social transformations. Born in 1859, he lived through the American Civil War, two World Wars, the Bolshevik revolution, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the early years of the Cold War. During his lifetime radio, TV, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, penicillin, the light bulb, and atomic weapons were invented. By the time he passed away in 1952, at the age of 92, the world was radically different. He recognized that humanity was set on an irreversible path of constant social change that would bring societies into contact with people, traditions, and ideas previously unknown and even unimaginable. And he understood the moral challenge this poses to philosophy: to articulate ways of thinking that would allow people to lead lives of meaning under conditions where traditional values become obsolete.

In his writings, which span the equivalent of thirty-seven volumes, Dewey addresses topics in all main areas of philosophy. He is best known for his contributions to the theory of education and is widely regarded as the most important philosopher of education of the twentieth century, and one of the most important of all time. But he also wrote important works on ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, logic, philosophy of science, political theory, psychology, metaphysics, and more. Dewey was also what we now call a public intellectual. Far from the stereotype of the thinker confined to the desk and preoccupied with logical riddles and transcendental speculations, Dewey was constantly engaged in social and political causes. In Chicago he founded the famous University Elementary School (Lab School), intended to serve not merely as a site for experiments in educational methods, but as a laboratory for democracy. He was also a vocal supporter of women’s suffrage and was involved in the work of Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s famous Hull House Settlement (Seigfried, 1999). He founded the American Association of University Professors and helped organize the New York City Teachers Union. He was involved in the establishment of the NAACP and the ACLU and led an international campaign supporting the outlawing of war that culminated in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 (Gibbon, 2019; Hathaway & Shapiro, 2017). Woven through such diversity of interests and activities, a singular moral orientation gave unity to Dewey’s life and career. In 1903, Dewey prophesized that the 20^th century would come to regard Ralph Waldo Emerson as the Philosopher of Democracy (Dewey, 1903/1976a). Within a few decades it would be Dewey’s name, not Emerson’s, that would be associated with that title. In China, during his visits in 1920–1921, he was called “Mr. Democracy.”

Dewey was indeed the philosopher of democracy, and it was a commitment to democracy that gave unity to his thought. For Dewey, democracy is more than a form of government; it is a way of life marked by an ongoing process of collaborative, experimental inquiry. It is life defined by communication as a means to making meaning across differences. Democracy is the spirit of learning from one another, sharing ever more deeply in each other’s interests and thus creating a social life that is progressively more and more inclusive. Dewey’s conception of democracy is in fact so expansive that to grasp it we need to understand not only his political philosophy, but also his ideas on psychology, education, the arts, religion, logic, and more.

As the philosopher of democracy, Dewey attempted to describe democratic themes that emerged all around him. But he was also engaged in the work of articulating unrealized possibilities. In Democracy and Education (1916/1980), for example, Dewey articulates a philosophy of education that in many ways is based on the work on the ground by teachers at the Lab School and close collaborators who were great educators like Francis W. Parker, Ella Flagg Young, and his many students and colleagues at the University of Chicago and Teachers College, Columbia University. At the same time, Democracy and Education offers a vision of a possible, yet unrealized world in which educational practice in schools creates habits of communication, thought, and action that radically transform social norms, institutions, and culture. In Art as Experience (1934/1987), as another example, Dewey presents a picture of the actually existing world as a way of signaling towards an unrealized world of possibilities, this time from the perspective of art and aesthetics. It presents a vision of a world in which the fine arts and everyday experiences come closer together, a world in which the depth of meaning and dignity of great art get revealed as aspects of human experience in general. This attention not only to actual conditions, but also and especially to the unrealized potential inherent in all experiences is one of the central features of the spirit of democracy at the heart of Dewey’s philosophy. A democratic society is a society in which individuals cultivate the habits of exploring new possibilities and responding creatively to new challenges. It is a kind of society that has not yet been created in the world. We believe that it is time to return to this ideal and respond to Dewey’s imaginative vision.

After Dewey’s death, the influence of his ideas in philosophy departments across the Unites States diminished to the point that it fell into virtual oblivion. The field of academic philosophy in the middle decades of the twentieth century was dominated by a split between the analytic school, that dominated the discipline in the English-speaking world, and the continental school, prominent in continental Europe and with a significant presence in the Unites States as well. The study and continuation of pragmatism and other originally American philosophies, including the work of Dewey, became marginalized. Since the 1980s, however, to a significant extent as a result of the influence of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), we see a renewed interest in Dewey’s ideas, a proliferation of scholarship on all aspects of his philosophy, and a revival of the pragmatist tradition as well as the emergence of a new philosophical school that claims the heritage of pragmatism: neopragmatism (see Glaude, 2008; Rorty, 1979; West, 1989). In recent years, some scholars have even advanced the interpretation that during the decades of putative oblivion, a few major thinkers within the dominant analytic school, like W. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Wilfrid Sellars, developed philosophical approaches that can be considered continuous with the pragmatist tradition (Misak, 2013).