Soka education and the land ethic: educational leadership toward the ‘creative co-existence of nature and humanity’^[1]

Abstract

As research has shown, the kind and degree of environmental ethics and eco-philosophy (or the lack thereof) may determine the effectiveness of pre-service teacher training in education for sustainable development. This is especially the case where in the ethical substratum of the conservationist Aldo Leopold and his Japanese precursor, the human geographer, Tsunesburo Makiguchi, sustainability is understood as the joint growth and development, the interconnected safety and protection of humans and non-humans alike, members of the biosphere. In reducing human beings to their own existence, anthropocentrism limits the parameters of that existence to the lesser self, when in Leopoldian and Makiguchian terms a greater self permeates and encompasses natural laws and principles over all time and space. Two global initiatives of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and more recently the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development (2005) and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), counterintuitively run against this non-anthropocentric environmental ethics. The search for a ‘creative co-existence of nature and humanity’ lies, on the other hand, at the heart of Soka education, a philosophy of education founded by Makiguchi and implemented worldwide at K-12 and tertiary schools by his successor, Daisaku Ikeda, a philosophy calling instead for the ‘sympathetic interaction’ of self and the environment. This is the epistemological revolution that environmentalists need to undergo for the sake not simply of sustainability but to decolonize and extend the Land Ethic from place-based to truly land-based in both theory and practice, the planet earth and the surrounding universe laying the foundation.

Keywords:

• Environmental ethics
• Soka education
• the land ethic
• education for sustainable development (ESD)
• institutional frameworks
• ‘creative coexistence of nature and humanity’
• community-based education
• human geography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 One of the Principles of Soka University of America (SUA) is to ‘Foster leaders for the creative co-existence of nature and humanity’ (Soka University of America 2019, 6).

2 For a more detailed background explanation of Soka education and its progenitor, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, see Goulah, J. and Andrew, G. (2009). ‘Tsunesaburo Makiguchi: Introduction to the man, his ideas, and the Special Issue.’ Educational Studies, 45 (2), 115–132 and Goulah and Gebert, (Eds.). (2014). Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944): Educational philosophy in context. London, UK: Routledge. Also useful would be Ikeda, D. (2001). Soka education: A Buddhist vision for teachers, students, and parents. Santa Monica, CA: Middleway Press.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John M. Heffron

John M. Heffron From the university’s opening in 2001, Heffron served as a member of the Humanities Concentration and from 2005 through 2016 as Dean of Students. He also served as Associate Director of the Pacific Basin Research Center from 1997 until 2014, in which capacity he edited and co-authored four books. In 2019 he was awarded with the BELMAS Management in Education 2018 Best Paper of the Year. In 2019, Heffron published his most recent book, single-authored, The Rise of the South in American Thought and Education: The Rockefeller Years (1902-1917) and Beyond. His research is situated at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, social and economic development, and the transnational sources of schooling.