The Moral and Educational Responsibilities of Teachers as Global Citizens

• In Event: Difference, Social Engagement, and Responsibility: Perspectives From the Dewey-Soka Heritage

Abstract

Daisaku Ikeda, leader of the global soka education movement, discussed the “myriad, interlocking crises” facing “global society” in 1996, noting in particular “issues of war, environmental degradation, the North-South development gap, and divisions among people based on differences of ethnicity, religion or language” (1996/2010 p. 102). Twenty years on, each of these continue to plague us. He declared then, and would likely confirm now, that we have failed to make progress because of our lack of attention to the root of the problems—and the root of the solution—the individual human being. To change society, we must change as people. In his words, “What is required is a human transformation—a human revolution” (ibid.). Soka education is premised on the idea that education has the greatest potential for transforming human beings, and therefore the greatest potential for transforming human society.
It is a truism in education that teachers teach more by who they are than by what they do. If education is how we hope to change the world, then teachers are the most important human beings in any society. In Ikeda’s words, “the humanity of the teacher represents the core of the educational experience.” John Dewey (1975/1909), in Moral Principles in Education, explained that morality, ethics and similar dispositional objectives cannot be taught, they can only be taught about. If we desire such outcomes for our students, they must be modeled. If our goal is global peace, teachers must model the care for self and others that will enable a loving, supportive classroom community. Ikeda drew on Dewey and Makiguchi in explaining that the community is the necessary site of education for global citizenship. It is the regard learners hold for self and nearby others that is extended to all the peoples of the earth, and the teacher must model the kind of regard that will lead us to global peace.
Such moral vision finds instantiation in Ikeda’s conception of the global citizen, who possesses three qualities:
〈 The wisdom to perceive the interconnectedness of all life and living.
〈 The courage not to fear or deny difference; but to respect and strive to understand people of different cultures, and to grow from encounters with them.
〈 The compassion to maintain an imaginative empathy that reaches beyond one's immediate surroundings and extends to those suffering in distant places.
These elements of character—wisdom, courage, compassion—cannot be taught to teacher candidates any more than morals and ethics can be taught to children. These come only as the result of inner work, the effort that a teacher puts into knowing him or herself well. There is no equivalent to medicine’s Hippocratic Oath for teaching, but if there was one, it should be a Socratic Oath: Know thyself. As Dr. Ikeda wrote in Soka Education, this “simple advice” is the key to wisdom, which is not learned from an external source, but is instead “rooted in the souls of human beings.”

Author

• Isabel Nunez, Purdue University Fort Wayne