Reinstating the Inherent Dignity of Marginalized Communities in Ghana

When a representative democracy implicitly or explicitly undermines minority rights and prevents marginalized people from actively participating in a democratic process, it facilitates social exclusion. This paper focuses on how Ghana’s democracy, coupled with traditions, aggravate social exclusion. The research discusses the democratization process of Ghana and its role in the marginalization of minorities. Particularly, this paper looks at the class-based marginalization of women on the one hand and the sex-based marginalization of the LGBTQI+ community on the other, in Ghana. Finally, this paper explores how Soka Education, as a way of life, can support these marginalized communities in Ghana.

Care and Value-Creating Education Put Into Action in Brazil: A Narrative Inquiry

This narrative inquiry highlights the experiences of self-identified Soka educators in a PreK-12th grade school in São Paulo, Brazil, as well as volunteers through a program called “Soka Education in Action.” Through their narratives, the role of care in value-creating education is explored as a critical aspect of education that supports students’ academic and personal growth and development, as well as educators’ professional identity and self-actualization. This study clarifies the essential qualities of Soka educators as understood and articulated by practitioners in the field. The narratives shared by study participants illuminate Soka education as a catalyst that fosters global citizenship by encouraging students to recognize their roles as agents of societal change and instruments of social justice.

Kenya’s 2017 Basic Education Curriculum Framework

Kenya’s 2017 competency-based curriculum, the Basic Education Curriculum Framework (BECF), seeks to address the skills gap in the education system and make the curriculum relevant to learners. Using Soka education as the philosophical framework, we provide a comprehensive review of BECF. The analysis in this essay covers the noteworthy provisions, double-edge policies, inconsistencies, issues of concern, and potential hurdles to implementation. It argues that the curriculum is not likely to produce the intended outcome due to inherent contradictions in the framework and the lack of an effective implementation plan. While BECF provides a broad and ambitious roadmap for the transformation of the Kenyan education system, actualizing the bold vision of BECF will require an extensive overhaul of the education system, a herculean task

Soka education as a theory of leadership

This research poses two interrelated questions. 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? And second, in the case of the latter, what are the available resources – historical, educational, philosophical, and transnational – for a countervailing vision of educational leadership, one rooted in precisely those democratic forms that have failed to find a hospitable environment in the home country: in the case of this research, 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 an inhospitable environment, 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 fundamental 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 demonstrates how an historical case from Japan can have broad contemporary use and significance for educational leadership and its preparation.