Soka education as a theory of leadership

This article introduces a countervailing vision of educational leadership, one rooted in democratic forms that, on the other hand, failed to find a hospitable environment in the country of origin, in this case feudal Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, when a heightened form of militant fascism ruled the country. The strength of an idea, especially one that emerges in circumstances unconducive to it, that draws its strength from a kind of stress of opposites, and that survives the political machinations against it, may in selective cases be sufficient enough to overcome the structural limits of context. One such idea, the article argues, is Soka, a Japanese term that translates as value creation. A basic critique of this philosophy is that ‘education is unproductive,’ not in the narrow economic sense of the term, but in the production of ‘benefit, good, and beauty,’ the building blocks of ‘value creation,’ a dynamic process of meaning-making within any given reality. The article explores the implications of this educational philosophy for contemporary principal preparation and practice.

That by the 1930s Japan had become a thoroughly militarized society, its schools made to serve the imperialistic aims of the government from the emperor on down, is more or less common knowledge. Less well-known are the contemporaneous efforts of one relatively obscure Japanese elementary school principal, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944), and his young protégé, Josei Toda (1900–1958), a mathematics educator, to keep alive a democratic stream of philosophical thought in education, which had lost its import by the time. ¹ In contrast to the militant nationalism underlying relations of school and society at least since the Imperial Rescript of 1890 was a very different kind of militancy – a quiet but no less distinct cultural and intellectual revolution, attempting to redefine those relations in new, radically humanistic ways. This revolution, which I argue has important significance today for how we think about educational leadership, arose under the name of Soka or value-creating education. It was not long before this countervailing educational and philosophical movement – aligned after 1930 with the no less iconoclastic, egalitarian Buddhism of the thirteenth-century Japanese religious reformer Nichiren – would come to the attention of the authorities. Everything Makiguchi and Toda stood for – individualism (although not, as we shall see, in the western liberal-positivist tradition), internationalism, and pacifism – was allied with treason. In 1943, both men were arrested as so-called ‘thought criminals,’ Makiguchi dying a year later in Sugamo Prison at the age of 73 (Bethel, 1984; Goulah and Gebert, 2014).

Today, nearly three-quarters of a century later, K-12 and tertiary Soka schools, upholding the educational ideals of Makiguchi, Toda, and their latter-day successor and the founder of the schools, Daisaku Ikeda, encircle the globe, stretching from Japan and Asia to Brazil and the United States. Since its opening in 2001, Soka University of America has seen more than 1,300 students graduate, with half the number coming from over 30 different countries. The Soka University campus in Japan has celebrated the success of more than 50,000 student graduations since opening in 1971. At the heart of Soka education is the belief that human beings, regardless of their circumstances, have an intrinsic capacity to generate value and meaning personally and interpersonally in their own lives and in the lives of others. ‘To live to the full realization of one’s potential,’ Makiguchi wrote almost a century ago, ‘is to attain and actualize values. Helping us to learn to live as creators of value is the purpose of education’ (Makiguchi, in Bethel, 1989: 54). Makiguchi placed heavy emphasis on what he called ‘personality integration,’ and elsewhere ‘self-reflection,’ as prerequisites to value creation. Self-reflection, however, would have to, in his words, ‘go beyond the infantile or primitive state of nondiscrimination of self and others or of sheer other-awareness, to come back,’ he wrote ‘to examine oneself in light of what one has contributed to that point, for better or worse, to the lives of those who share one’s communal existence’ (Makiguchi, in Bethel, 1989: 86–87). Soka education is not so much a philosophy of education as a philosophy of life – one in which the creation of value for the sake of oneself and others constitutes the highest form of meaning. As Ikeda has written: ‘The ultimate goal of Soka, or value-creating, education is to foster people of character who continuously strive for the ‘greatest good’ of peace, who are committed to protecting the sanctity of life, and who are capable of creating value under even the most difficult circumstances’ (Ikeda, 2001: 115).

Compare Makiguchi’s notion that ‘achievement is individual, improvement social’ (Ward, 1906: 6), stressing the inseparability of the individual from the social consequences of his or her actions, with The Principles of the National Polity promulgated by the Hirohito government in 1937, in which the purpose of education was to keep alive a spirit to protect and maintain the prosperity of the Imperial throne, the so-called ‘Divine Rulership,’ and expressly not the ‘development and perfection of one’s character as set forth in individualistic pedagogics’ (Stephens, 1991: 47). In 1941, the Ministry of Education published ‘The Way of the Imperial Subject,’ which became required reading in most Japanese schools, stating ‘it is not permissible to regard one’s private life as subject to one’s will and to be indifferent to the nation, and thereby to lead a selfish life’ (Stephens, 1991: 60), concealing emperor worship in an artificial dichotomy, opposed by Makiguchi, between the private and the public self. As early as 1928, 3 years after Japan introduced universal male suffrage and appeared to be heading down the road of constitutionalism, if not democracy, specialized agencies of thought control housed within the Ministry of Education had begun drawing up plans for a thought program – one that would ensure constitutional allegiance to an aggressive ultra-nationalist agenda. One of these agencies, the Council on Innovation in Education and Learning, in 1936 made the following recommendations:

Japanese institutions should be interpreted in accordance with national aims, which should be contrasted with the individualism and materialism of the West.

As Stephens writes, ‘education was expected to produce a standard Japanese citizen who could be obedient to the government’ (Stephens, 1991: 51) or, in Epp’s words, ‘a man trained to be loyal and obedient, not free and equal’ (Epp, in Bethel, 1984: 29). Makiguchi bet his life and reputation on a very different understanding of the relationship between the individual, the state, and society, his entire educational career ‘a protest against the production of subjects’ (Bethel, 1984: 29). This, as it turns out, would come to apply with equal force not only to students but to teachers and administrators and to the families that supported them.

This article asks two interrelated questions. First, how important is it for the formation of democratic ideas about educational leadership that the group or individual promoting those ideas is operating within a democratic political environment or, to the contrary, in the absence of one? Makiguchi, for one, was operating in an environment antithetical to his moral and intellectual ideals, which were a protest against the feudal, Confucianist principles embodied in the Imperial Rescript that as a school principal he was, nevertheless, expected to uphold and preserve. This brings us to our second question. What were the available resources – historical, educational, philosophical, and transnational – for a countervailing vision of educational leadership, one rooted in precisely those democratic forms that failed to find a hospitable environment in feudal Japan in the 1930s and 1940s? The purpose of this investigation, and the reason for asking our questions this way, is to shed light from a very different time and place on the current, not-so-different challenges to the modern principalship and to propose a novel way forward, i.e. Soka or value creation.

As a school principal, Makiguchi was prohibited by Japanese law from direct political involvement, and yet the four books he published over his lifetime (and was able to get past government censors) are a testimony to the political power of his ideas. They provide a clue to Makiguchi’s unique approach to problems of educational administration, a view resisting simple categorization as either progressive or traditional, Eastern or Western. Here I examine, even cursorily, each of them in their turn. Makiguchi published his first major work in 1903, The Geography of Human Life (Jinsei chirigaku), followed in 1912 by Research into Community Studies as the Integrating Focus of Instruction (Kyoju no to-gochushin toshite no kyodoka kenkyu) (Makiguchi, 1912), and 4 years later by Research into Methods and Content of Geography Instruction (Chiri kyoju n hoho oyobi naiyono kenkyu, 1916). These works and the thought that went into them helped lay the foundation for his major educational work, The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy (Soka kyoikugaku taikei), appearing in four volumes, the first in 1930 and the second, third, and fourth volumes in 1931, 1932, and 1934, respectively (Makiguchi, 1930, 1931). Value Creating Pedagogy is considered the first pedagogical system in Japan to be born out of day-to-day educational practices in the actual classroom (Takeuchi, 1986), but in Makiguchi’s philosophy, a classroom without walls – a semipermeable membrane for the exchange and ultimately for the equalization of forces within it and without it. The local community was not something ‘out there’ to be served, nor did parents’ responsibility for the education of their children stop at the school door. School, community, and society, animate and inanimate nature shared a single universe of overlapping influence and dependence. It was the role of education to tease out these interconnections and to utilize them for the production of good, beauty, and gain or benefit – the triad of human values that Makiguchi proposed as the basic means and ends of value creation (Goulah, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c).

In A Geography of Human Life, which in its time was state-approved reading for anyone who wanted to teach geography in Japan, Makiguchi invited his readers to:

…regard people, animals, trees, rivers, rocks, or stones in the same light as ourselves and realize that we have much in common with them all. Such interactions cause us to feel, if not consciously think, ‘If I were in their (or its) place, what would I feel…or do?’ Sympathetic interactions occur, therefore, when you regard or feel another person or object that you are in contact with as a part of yourself or one of your kind. You share experience with that person or object and are able to place yourself in the position of that person or object. (Makiguchi, in Bethel, 2002: xiv)

In teaching to children an appreciation of all the many people and forces at work in the creation of a single article of clothing or piece of furniture, we teach them, asserted Makiguchi, that ‘the community is a microcosm of the world. If we encourage children to observe directly the complex relationships between people and the land, between nature and society, we will be able to help them grasp the realities of their homes, their school, the town, village or city, and to understand the wider world’ (Makiguchi, in Garrison et al., 2014: 148). It was important to plan educational experiences – direct, firsthand experiences in the child’s immediate environment – designed explicitly to foster this ‘deeper way of seeing and learning about the world’ (Bethel, 2002: 23).

As Gebert (2009) has shown, Makiguchi’s kyodo or local community, a site of interpenetrating micro and macro worlds, was not at all the same thing the government had in mind when it, too, called for community studies. For the solipsistic Japanese state, the kyodo was ‘an assemblage of particularisms that remained meaningless until linked to the ultimate particularism of the Japanese state’ (Gebert, 2009: 149). But the local community, as Makiguchi asserted, was irreducible to particulars of time and place, history and culture, form and constituency. In discovering the universal in the particular, beginning with students’ local knowledge, which was foundational, and working outward from the nation to the world, schools would begin to prepare the Japanese people for a larger ‘constitutional citizenship,’ not so much in the political sense of the term as in the more general one of ‘pertaining to the composition of a thing, and essential,’ the standard dictionary definition (Urdang, 1968: 288). If these notions seem radical and out of context with their times, it is important to understand that they were equally out of sync with traditional Confucian as with modern democratic interpretations of the natural world – the one aimed at the naturalization of the state, and the other at the bureaucratization of nature.

Makiguchi was an avid aficionado of the work of the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward, believing, like him, that the individual is ‘not to imitate the methods by which nature accomplished results, but must direct the forces of nature into channels of his own advantage, and utilize for his own good all the powers of the universe’ (Ward, in McClay, 1994: 129). The truths of nature were less important for him than what people were able to make of them for the creation of value. For unlike the discovery of truth, the production of values was just that – an act of creation. As Makiguchi wrote in Value Creating Pedagogy in a natural extension of A Geography of Human Life:

When we speak of creation, we refer to the process of bringing to light whatever has bearing on human life from among elements already existing in nature, evaluating these discoveries, and through the addition of human effort further enhancing that relevancy. In other words, creation reworks the ‘found order’ of nature into an order with special benefits for humanity. Strictly speaking, then, creation applies only to value and not to truth, for truth stops at the point of discovery. (Makiguchi, in Bethel, 1989: 56–57)

The distinction between truth and value was an important one for Makiguchi, and not simply for philosophical reasons but for sound educational ones. He bemoaned the fact that too often educators, especially educational leaders, confused cognition (apperception of the facts) with evaluation (interpretation of the facts). It’s not simply that they mistake what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ or what ‘should be’ for what actually ‘is,’ cloaking value judgments in statements of truth and vice versa; they fail to understand that the facts themselves do not say anything, do not impose any meaning. It is the educator guided by particular purposes, good or bad, relevant or irrelevant, who imposes a meaning. Certainly, one manifestation of this is the preference – without any real scientific basis – for quantitative over qualitative measures of academic success, a problem not only in our own time but in Makiguchi’s as well. In a passage from his writings that could have been written just yesterday, Makiguchi speaks of being ‘driven almost to distraction’ by the specter of ‘ten million young people forced to endure the agonies of cutthroat competition, the difficulty of getting into good schools, the “examination hell” and the struggle for jobs after graduation’ (Makiguchi, in Ibrahim, 2009: 226).

Makiguchi placed the blame for this state of affairs not only on the confusion of cognition and evaluation or on the nationalist goals of the Shinto state, but on the kind and degree of educational leadership itself. His approach to the reform of educational administration was twofold: calling on the one hand for stricter standards for entering the profession, in other words, for the greater professionalization of principals and school inspectors, and, on the other, for greater community responsibility and control over the management and supervision of schools, including, under important pre-conditions, the hiring and firing of principals. The militarization of the country notwithstanding, people living in Japan in the 1930s enjoyed a level of individual autonomy and with it a sense of entitlement – as individual tax-payers, as consumers, and as voters – that would have been unknown only a generation before. There was no more important or effective way to express this autonomy than to exercise it over their schools ‘as part of their constitutional rights,’ wrote Makiguchi (Bethel, 1989: 132). Wanting in such an age to limit the power of educational administrators, to ‘keep these offices to passive, preventive roles, and eliminate pretension to active steering functions,’ Makiguchi called for the ‘home rule’ of Japanese public schools (Bethel, 1989: 133, 131). The time had come for parents and local groups to begin to take greater direct responsibility for the quality of their children’s education. ‘For better or worse,’ he wrote, ‘it is now the community’s own school, understood as an extension of home life’ (Bethel, 1989: 131). On a par with all their other household and child-rearing duties was the need now to make ‘educational studies figure into their common knowledge’ and for parents to familiarize themselves with the contents of the curriculum, issues of grading, testing, and evaluation, and different types of pedagogy and their effectiveness (Bethel, 1989: 132). This was especially important if, as Makiguchi believed they should, parents were now to become involved in the evaluation of teachers and administrators.

Two contemporary experiments in ‘democratic’ school governance, one in the United States, Chicago’s Local School Councils (LSCs), and one in England, the school governing boards (GBs), demonstrate the limits and extent of what Fung and Wright have called ‘accountable autonomy’ – the capacity-building necessary to justify the devolution of power and authority from the center to the periphery, from ‘expert managerialism’ to parents and the community (Fung and Wright, 2003: 111, 139). The standard composition of an Appointed Local School Council is six parents, two community representatives, two teachers, the school’s principal, two advocates, and one student representative at the high school level. The responsibilities include, as Makiguchi suggested they should, personnel evaluation, strategic school improvement planning, including issues of curriculum and instruction, and resource allocation. Elected on an annual basis, parent representation on the LSCs is a small fraction of the estimated four thousand residences served by any given school, which begs the question, ‘How much participation is enough?’ (Fung and Wright, 2003: 131) For Makiguchi, the problem was a more holistic one, of how to break down the artificial barriers between school, the home, and the community, according each, and expecting of each, an equal sense of responsibility and commitment to the education of the child.

England’s GBs consist generally of a head teacher, staff representatives, elected parents, and elected local officials. Although unlike LSCs they tend to privilege lay knowledge, being careful not to educate it out of existence, they hedge their bets by placing the headmaster at the lead. Reports one such leader, ‘actually you, as headteacher, are telling them what has to be in place. You are leading them all the time’ (as cited in Young, 2017: 47). At the end of the day, reflects Young, ‘lay knowledge, with its lack of associated expertise, is easily marginalized and displaced by managerial knowledge’ (Young, 2017: 53). For his own part, it was never Makiguchi’s intention to invite local, folk knowledge unalloyed into the classroom as a sort of bastion against formal learning, nor to impose the latter on the former, but rather to see them as linked and reinforcing. Teachers needed to come down from their thrones to meet students as equals in the learning process, and so too should school leaders work collaboratively with teachers and parents. Principals had administrative duties to uphold certain rules and regulations ‘passively’, but this role was secondary to ‘actively working to increase the effectiveness of the teachers under them’ (Makiguchi, in Bethel, 1989: 111), what today we would call (and misinterpret as) instructional leadership. For this was to be accomplished not by imposing performance standards on teachers, but by essentially getting out of the way, ‘removing obstacles that would otherwise prevent dedicated and motivated teachers from taking the initiative in implementing their skills’ (Bethel, 1989: 111). Indeed, given the deplorable level of their professional education and training, administrators, argued Makiguchi, were ‘in no position to pass evaluative judgments on the competence of teachers’ (Bethel, 1989: 133). The principal’s main order of business was to first do no harm.

Today, it may not be poor preparation (or a dearth of any real preparation at all, as in Makiguchi’s time) so much as over-preparation that disqualifies the average school principal from sitting in judgement of a teacher’s abilities. ‘Backing off’ (Woods, 2005: 108) or ‘shedding status’ (Trafford, 2003: 64), in the current idiom of democratic leadership, is easier said than done, requiring finely honed communication skills, a knowledge base imbued with democratic principles, a fundamental aversion to top-down, command and control styles of leadership, and non-bureaucratic sensibilities; these and other traits and capacities are not always taught or certainly not explicitly in most principal preparation programs (Woods, 2005: 109–115). In the standards and data-driven environment of today’s schools, more important is the mastery of such functional skills as resource allocation, scheduling, planning, and computer applications. There is some evidence that, with all this, principals nevertheless find themselves grossly unprepared for the realities of everyday school life. In a recent national study of US public school principals (N = 1206) to the survey question, ‘What are the major challenges that you face as a school principal?’ respondents cited (in order of exasperation): ‘being asked to do more for less money;’ ‘lack of community support;’ ‘pressures from above for NCLB compliance and scores;’ and ‘changing the instructional culture to data-driven decision making;’ ‘time to complete administrative requirements and provide instructional leadership concurrently;’ and over and over again simply ‘overwhelmed’ (Wise, 2014). Although there may be no comparison between the kind and degree of leadership preparation in Makiguchi’s time and our own, in the end professionalization mattered less to Makiguchi than that the school function as a laboratory for the working out of a democratic social order, its customs and mores (Goulah and He, 2015; Ito, 2007). The important thing was ‘to create a horizontal structure of equally and mutually supportive relations between teaching and administration, instead of the present vertical hierarchy’ (Bethel, 1989: 134). This was a clarion call in the 1930s from which we still have much to learn today for the reform of education and educational leadership.

Makiguchi lived, worked, and ultimately triumphed in a society that for all its potential to change could hardly have been less congenial, however, to his thoughts and beliefs. This brings us back to our original questions: How truly effective (disenabling, that is) are the structural limitations within which would-be reformers operate? Is the only choice left to such aspirants one between hard-nosed realism and other-worldly idealism? If not, how then is it possible to think outside of the box without necessarily leaving the box or creating a new box of one’s own? Makiguchi’s answer to these questions was, in a word, Soka or value creation – a powerful concept but also, and most importantly, a practical tool for making sense of and turning to advantage (for everyone concerned) the circumstances in which leaders find themselves. Value creation, to distinguish it from values education, is a process of meaning-making under circumstances in which meaning is not always ready-made, but rather indeterminate and contingent. Value-creating educational leaders are not waiting around for the ideal conditions to make a difference nor do they find it is necessary to engineer those conditions into existence before such a change can be made. ‘Creation,’ as Makiguchi said, ‘reworks the “found order” of nature into an order with special benefits for humanity.’ The ‘found order’ confronting any principal or school superintendent in any country and under any political system is not an a priori ‘given’ but his or her working materials for the challenge of value creation. In a kind of symbolic interactionism between teachers, students, and administrators, as well as with parents and the local community, ‘the meaning of [things]’ as Blumer (1969) writes, ‘is derived from, and arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and society.’ Meaning-making or value creation is a communal exercise, calling, if so, for a very different kind of educational leadership: one without strict divisions at the local, state, or national level.

Because value creation is so potentially effective a weapon against moral and spiritual defeatism – in the United States something of a plague in the ranks of public school leadership – Makiguchi was very explicit about its criteria. By its very nature, value creation is not something to happen of itself; on the contrary, it requires careful planning and preparation, and the need to anticipate problems and to take precautionary measures to ensure preferred outcomes. In their search for meaning or value, people ‘mistakenly choose means insufficient to reach that end’ and fall short of creating the value or meaning they seek. Those means are insufficient, which, in Makiguchi’s view, are ‘incapable of seeing any further than the immediate objectives at hand.’ In addition to nearsightedness, a ‘self-oriented worldview’ constituted another insufficiency of means to the end of value creation. Education for value creation was the deliberate process of educating individuals out of inexperience, out of dependency on the work and thought of others, out of second-hand knowledge, out of habituation to ‘momentary or circumstantial terms’ – a euphemism for immediate results – and out of ignorance of past successes and failures of every hue and cry. Indeed, value creation was for Makiguchi an ‘applied science,’ the essence of which was ‘the ability to abstract those elements and conditions indispensable for success out of numerous past advances and setbacks, whether one’s own or learned from others’ (Makiguchi, in Bethel, 1989: 89; Goulah and Gebert, 2009). Strong personal character was cause and effect of the ability to create value, beginning with the acquisition of ‘mature core beliefs and a sense of purpose in life.’ This in turn would lead to the two most important prerequisites for value creation – ‘mind and body unity’ and ‘psychological consistence over time.’ Such a person, and only such a person, in Makiguchi’s view, ‘is empowered to create value.’ It was the task of education ‘to provide guidance toward this end,’ this guidance being the whole of ‘the meaning of education’ itself (Makiguchi, in Bethel, 1989: 87–89).

Unless and until our master’s and doctoral programs in educational leadership and administration begin to operate along something like these lines, factoring into the education of our future leaders the affective qualities of ‘mind and body unity’ and ‘psychological consistence over time,’ as well as the acquisition of ‘mature core beliefs and a sense of purpose in life,’ we will not quite see the unlocking of leadership and management potential in different contexts – the theme of the 2016 BELMAS conference – that we all hope for. How we educate for these things or build them into the professional development of practicing principals is not altogether clear. Makiguchi’s answer, if it is of any help, was threefold, however. Of first importance was the moral and intellectual education of future school leaders such that they ‘will not operate out of blind intuition or dogma,’ but also that they are attuned at all times to and ‘seek to remedy the moral ills of society’ (Bethel, 1989: 114, 109). This was because it was the principal’s ‘first order of business’ to ‘bring a peaceful order to the school,’ without which nothing else mattered. Key to the ability to construct such an environment was the principal’s awareness of ‘the real-life circumstances of the people,’ an awareness only made possible by the ‘scientific study of social realities’ or what today we might call the sociology or the anthropology of education – subjects missing from most leadership preparation programs (Bethel, 1989: 129). Although nothing like our modern administrative services credential with its focus on supervision, management, and discipline, Makiguchi advocated, finally, pre-employment and on-the-job examination requirements for principals – which would test for these and other hopelessly impractical areas of knowledge, subscribing with Plato to the ‘usefulness of the useless’ in the education of the administrator as philosopher king (Rousse, 1999: 327). As the ‘essence of the job’ lay in ‘active value creation’ rather than in accounting, record keeping, ‘coordination and compliance with higher supervision,’ and tasks of ‘subordinate value,’ the true test of principals’ ability to lead was to ‘increase the effectiveness of teachers under them…What this boils down to,’ wrote Makiguchi, ‘is not so much running the show as removing the obstacles that would otherwise prevent dedicated and motivated teachers from taking the initiative in implementing their skills’ (Bethel, 1989: 111). Knowing those obstacles and how to remove them was the sin qua non of a good preparation program. Course and program learning objectives that target these and other competencies associated with value creation understand or have as their outcome a wholesale restructuration of the school principalship.