Soka Education in Brazil: Daisaku Ikeda’s Value-Creating Pedagogy in Escola Soka do Brasil

• In Event: A Cosmopolitan Curriculum of Value Creation: Examining Daisaku Ikeda’s Philosophy of Education

Abstract

The second panelist will present findings from an ethnographic case study of Daisaku Ikeda’s (2006, 2010a, 2010b) philosophy of Soka (literally “value-creating”) education in Escola Soka do Brasil in São Paulo. Founded in 2001, Escola Soka do Brasil (Brazil Soka Kindergarten and Elementary School) provides the only institutionalization of Soka education in Latin America. This study has two objectives: 1.) to provide the first empirical study of Ikeda’s institutionalization of Soka education in Latin America in general and Brazil in particular and 2.) to identify the practice, merits, and limitations of this institutionalization in the context of Brazil’s education reforms. 

The largest South American country and fifth largest globally, Brazil is a racially, religiously and environmentally diverse nation that has experienced colonization and slavery. It has the world’s sixth largest economy but large gaps remain among socioeconomic classes. In 2003, Brazil initiated the formation of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations to leverage its leadership in “second world” trade and to move geopolitically and socioeconomically beyond the second world (Khanna, 2008); however, Rodríguez (2008; see also Barrionuevo, 2010; Forero, 2008) argued that Brazil’s inadequate public education system, which serves 50 million, will limit such development. Brazil’s recent education reforms seek to foster the literacy, skills, and discrete knowledge necessary to compete in a geopolitically and socioeconomically globalized world.
 However, this panelist’s findings from an ethnographic case study (Creswell, 1997) and critical discourse analysis (Rogers, 2004) of classroom observations, student work, and formal and informal audio-recorded interviews with three administrators, two curriculum directors, nine teachers, and tens of current and former students, indicate that Soka education envisions and practices more than the accretion of discrete knowledge: “To know is not enough.”

Participants’ articulation and demonstration of value-creating Soka education reveal that equally necessary—but missing from Brazil’s current education reforms—are characteristics of what Ikeda calls “human education” (2006) and locally practiced global citizenship (2010a, 2010b): wisdom from knowledge, happiness, the ability to create value in and from negative and positive situations, and the cultivation of humanistic values of peace, compassion, dialogue, courage, cooperation, and human-nature interconnection. Based on the explicit cultivation of these characteristics in the context of core subject lessons, K-8 students in the Brazil Soka schools not only acquire discrete knowledge and skills. They also subscribe to “Soka values” of peace, cooperation, coexistence and compassion and demonstrate the ability to “create value” in their daily life and school-based learning after graduating from Escola Soka do Brasil based on these Soka values.

Author

• Jason Goulah, DePaul University