Value Creation and Happiness in Education: Daisaku Ikeda and Asia as Method

• In Event: Philosophical Inquiry as Consequential Research: Interrogating the Means and Ends of Ethics and Education

Abstract

This critical and bilingual-bicultural conceptual research examines Japanese educator Ikeda Daisaku’s (1988–2015) perspectives on value creation and happiness in education relative to those of Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (1981–1996), who a century ago pioneered the philosophy of value creation as happiness. It advances two interlocking arguments. First, the author argues the pervasive unhappiness among youth today (Goddard, 2021; Prager, 2020; Thompson, 2022) shaped in part by and in combination with an education system in freefall demands that the field consider Ikeda’s (and Makiguchi’s) approach in research, theory, and practice. Second, the author argues this necessary attention to Ikeda’s and Makiguchi’s work illustrates the need for the field—and AERA in particular—to more explicitly consider and engage with Asian thought in developing educative ways of knowing, being, becoming, and valuing.
On the first point, value creation is integral to Ikeda’s core philosophy of ningen kyōiku, or “human education” (Goulah, 2021). Not to be confused with corporate models of sustainable economic growth (Madden, 2020), Ikeda’s (1988–2015) approach to value creation, from Makiguchi’s philosophy of sōka kyōikugaku, or “value-creating pedagogy,” is advanced as the central ethos of peaceful and contributive living in and beyond the context of schooling. Following Makiguchi, Ikeda asserts that the purpose of education must be the lifelong happiness of learners and that true happiness is to be found in a life of value creation, or “the capacity to find meaning, to enhance one’s own existence and contribute to the well-being of others, under any circumstance” (Ikeda, 2021, p. 6). Specifically, it is an ever-expanding capacity to create meaning of gain, good, and beauty—that is, sensorially pleasing and utilitarian value that serves oneself and others—from the proper cognition of life’s facticities. Such value creation demonstrates one’s agency, enhances the vital processes of daily living, and results in genuine, almost existential happiness (Ikeda, 1988–2015).
On the second point, despite the demographic growth of Asians globally and in the West (World Population Review, 2022), representation of Asian thought remains underrepresented in Western/U.S. educational research, theory, and practice, particularly relative to that of other, less populous marginalized communities. For example, a decadal (2011–2021) meta-analyses of Educational Researcher, AERA’s most frequent and widely distributed high-impact journal, reveals a conspicuous absence of non-Western, particularly Asian, ontologies and epistemologies. Understanding Asian onto-epistemologies is necessary in its own right but is also necessary for full Western becoming.
Using “Asia as Method” (Takeuchi, 1981; Chen, 2010), this research examines Ikeda’s approach as both informed by Western thought and coloniality and uniquely Asian as a response to the West. Moving beyond essentializations of Asians and Asian thought “for Asians,” this study presents Ikeda’s approach as a transcultural “middle way” that both deconstructs Western-centric imaginaries (Chakrabarty, 2007; Said, 1979) and opens the West to new ways of knowing and being. The author concludes by introducing Ikeda’s perspective on the bodhisattva ethic of removing suffering and imparting joy as a supra-Buddhist identity dimension and motive force for individuals in education.

Author

• Jason Goulah, DePaul University
  Presenting Author