Determining to Be Hopeful in Hopeless Times

• In Event: Hope and Joy in Curriculum Studies: Engaging With Daisaku Ikeda's Thought

Abstract

U.S. Education can be described as far from hopeful. The literature abounds with “problems” such as the harmful effects of standardized tests, defunding of public schools, and the school-to-prison pipeline, to name a few (e.g., Laura, 2014; Means, 2013; Saltman, 2017). At such a time, it is imperative that we reinvigorate hope in our practice. The two characters in the Japanese word for hope (希望, kibō) mean “rare” and “to look far into the future.” Hope is thus the capacity to envision an unlikely future. This means that, to have hope, we need to be able not only to articulate what is wrong, but also imagine what can be. Therefore, drawing on Ikeda’s (2017) perspective that “hope is a decision” (p. 5), this paper calls on the field to determine to be hopeful in hopeless times and proposes three areas by which we can make a change: 1) focus on what we can change, 2) nurture each student’s strengths, and 3) make curriculum an opportunity to foster global citizenship. These areas are grounded in three essential concepts in Ikeda’s educational philosophy: human revolution (Ikeda, 2010a), or volitional and continuous inner transformation (Goulah, 2012), human education (Goulah, 2020b; Goulah & Ito, 2012; Ikeda, 2013), and education for global citizenship (Goulah, 2020a, Ikeda, 2010a; Obelleiro, 2012). Each of these decisions also corresponds to a change in perspective toward the self (including one’s sense of what is possible), students, and the curriculum, respectively.

Author

• Nozomi Inukai, DePaul University