Aligning Education and Development Towards True Sustainability by Using Tsurumi’s Vision of Japanese Animism

• In Event: Roundtable Group 14
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: SDGs, Voice and Innovation

Proposal

In the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, the international community agreed on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and used “Education for Sustainable Development” (ESD), as the major tool for achieving the goals (Alguren, 2021 ).
Anthropocentric and capitalist values central to are hostile to living in harmony with nature. Therefore, they will not guarantee sustainability. Before we start theorizing on how best to employ education to support sustainability, we must radically recalibrate our understanding of true sustainability. This presentation attempts to do so by using Kazuko Tsurumi’s study of Japanese animism.
Tsurumi (1998) asserts that sustainable society is achieved when all humans and non-human entities live happily in harmony. Her vision of sustainability is rooted in Japanese animism, which recognizes that all beings (human and non-human) have spirits and are equally important (Gill & Tsurumi, 2014). Beliefs in the spiritual nature of all beings and the connection between humans and non-human beings, particularly with land and water, overlap with principles and practices shared among indigenous communities in the North and South American continent (Datta, 2018; Eppert, 2021; McKeon, 2012; Restoule, 2013) In the ideal society, all actors communicate with each other and forge harmonious inter-dependent relationships together driven by spirits inside them. Tsurumi’s (1998) analysis of Mura (community), which is built on a balanced relationship between water and land, also provides a unique perspective on sustainable society. Mura has its own eco-system, and non-human and human actors’ interactions within the system shape economic, social, spiritual, and cultural activities there (Gill & Tsurumi, 2014). Each mura attained sustainability autonomously using the bottom-up approach of governance. This approach is an alternative to implementations of SDGs, which rely on externally derived guidelines and a top-down method of governance.
Transposing Tsurumi’s idea of sustainability to education provides us with a new vision of education. Education will focus on learning about human and non-human actors (trees, bodies of water, animals) in students’ mura. Students will think about how they want to be a part of reciprocal relationships with other actors in mura to increase happiness for all. Learning will center around direct interactions with non-human and human actors; thus, students will spend more time outside of the school building engaging in experiential activities. This type of education is fundamentally different from current ESD, whose pre-determined goals are “actions” for economic growth with “problem-solving” dedicated to the negative side effects that a capitalist economy will almost always produce. Tsurumi’s work offers a new notion of sustainability that works within natural processes instead of against them. With it education dedicated to true sustainability can create a genuinely sustainable society where all beings contribute to the co-creation of happiness.

Author

• Kaoru Miyazawa, Lesley University