ABSTRACT
This article focuses on Daisaku Ikeda’s (b. 1928) contributions to peace education. Known widely as president of the Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International (SGI),1 Ikeda is also a renowned peacebuilder and the founder of the secular Soka schools network, which includes six kindergartens, three primary schools, two secondary schools, a women’s college, and two universities in seven countries across
Jason Goulaha and Olivier Urbainb
Asia and the Americas. Soka University also contains one of Japan’s largest correspondence education programs. As SGI president and as an educator, Ikeda has addressed (and embodied) ‘peace education’ in three distinct ways: through his actualization of Soka education; through engaged dialogue and cultural exchange; and through his repeated proposals for a United Nations for Education and education for disarmament and human rights (under which he includes anti-bullying, sustainability, and global citizenship). Individual and local SGI member organizations around the world regularly enact Ikeda’s perspectives and practices of engaged dialogue and cultural exchange in their monthly discussion meetings; they realize his proposals for (education for) global citizenship, disarmament, human rights, sustainability, and non-violence through many traveling exhibits, cultural presentations, and policy initiatives. In terms of Soka education, although Ikeda does not administrate in or write curriculum for the 14 independent Soka schools, his perspectives, proposals, and practices inform their programs in compulsory and elective cultural exchange; (extra) curricular initiatives in global citizenship, sustainability, human rights, and disarmament; anti-bullying campaigns; and their underlying ethos to foster ‘world citizens in solidarity for peace.’ In addition, schools, universities, and thousands of educators worldwide – outside the Soka educational system – apply Ikeda’s ideas to curriculum and instruction (Gebert and Joffee 2007; Goulah and Ito 2012; Miller 2002), and over 40 university-affiliated Ikeda research centers have been established in Argentina, China, Denmark, Japan, and Taiwan. However, scholarship on Ikeda’s ideas – especially in practice in peace education – is lacking in the extant, particularly Anglophone, literature (for exceptions, see e.g. Goulah 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d; Ikeda 1987b; Soka Kyoiku Kenkyujo 2009; The Academic Association 20062007; Urbain 2010, 2013). Herein, we aim to begin to fill this gap.
