Dewey and the Soka Education Tradition on Value Creation: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue

• In Event: 52.063 - The Dewey–Soka Heritage: Dialogue, Reconstruction, and Value-Creative Democracy as Justice

Abstract

In this presentation I explore the concept of value creation as it finds articulation in the educational philosophical tradition of Soka, and in the work of John Dewey. I consider these traditions comparatively and bring them into dialogue. Comparative analysis reveals that for both traditions values emerge from creative responses to encounters with difference, they are formed through processes of experimental inquiry. In other words, for both Dewey and the Soka education tradition, education is not merely the practices and institutions to transmit values from one generation to the next, but the process through which we create values. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944), the founder of Soka education, explicitly argued that the creation of value was the purpose of education (Ikeda, 2010).
I rely on the bilingual-bicultural Dewey-Soka dialogue (Ikeda, Garrison & Hickman, 2014) as both lens and method of inquiry for revealing common threads in the educational philosophies in question. In the case of Dewey, I offer an account of the significance of various aspects of his philosophy for his conceptions of the nature of values and his theory of valuation. From the perspective of his instrumentalism and experimentalism, for example, values are tools we employ in dealing with problematic situations, and they develop as we use them in practice (Dewey, 1988; Putnam, 2002). From the perspective of his contextualism and transactional realism, values emerge from and never metaphysically transcend particular circumstances (Dewey, 2008); they come into being together with subjectivity and objectivity through transactional relations (Dewey, 1986; Joas, 2000).
In the case of Ikeda, who together with Makiguchi is the main representative of the Soka education tradition, I explore aspects of his thought worth considering for understanding his conception of value creation. Like Dewey and in line with the Buddhist tradition from where he writes, Ikeda’s philosophical style is characterized by the systematic collapse of dualisms. For example, rather than considering values as belonging to a realm separate from that of facts, for Ikeda values emerge from nature, through the continuum of nature and society, also expressed in the oneness of mind (ku) and matter (ke) (Ikeda, 1982). Rather than identifying the source of values exclusively in the subjective, individual experience of personal preferences, or in the interpersonal, agreed upon norms of a social group, Ikeda identifies the source of values in the continuum of individual self and world (esho-funi), and particularly in the principle of dependent co-arising (engi) (Ikeda, 1991-2014, Vol. 17; 2010a).
By bringing Dewey’s educational philosophy into a cross-cultural dialogic engagement, this presentation provides conceptual resources for reading aspects of Dewey’s thought in a new light. In particular, I hope the conceptions of value and value creation here developed can help us rethink important issues in educational justice.

Author

• Gonzalo Obelleiro, Teachers College, Columbia University