Lessons from Daisaku Ikeda and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi
Jason Goulah
In this chapter I consider the (re)militarization and, to a lesser extent, corporatization of foreign and second language education in a post-9/11 context and in light of increased immigration. In so doing, I seek to locate the discussion of education as enforcement both within and beyond the borders of the United States. As I have elsewhere rejected at length school-based language instruction for expressly military, monetary and material purposes,1 I do not reiterate those arguments here. Instead, I briefly trace the literature on militarization in language education and introduce Daisaku Ikeda’s (1928–) concept of “society for education” as a corrective to what he calls the “spirit of abstraction” fostered by ideological, militaristic, economic and political policies and practices in education in general and language education in particular.
Writing about the neoliberal profiteering and militarization of crisis and megadisaster strategized and authorized by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, Naomi Klein argues the American public found itself living
in a kind of Year Zero, in which everything we knew of the world before could now be dismissed as “pre-9/11 thinking.” Never strong in our knowledge of history, North Americans had become a blank slate—“a clean sheet of paper” on which “the newest and most beautiful words can be written,” as Mao said of his people.2
Such rewriting, however, was not limited only to the marketplace proper but also to areas the market and military have impacted for years such as education. Specifically, in the field of second and foreign language education administration insiders were immediately present to draft the new and beautiful words—“clash of civilizations,” “Axis of evil,” “Islamo-fascism,” “homeland security,” and so forth—on “the canvas of our posttrauma consciousness”3 as 9/11 again opened discussions about the direction of language policy and practice.4
President Bush’s 2006 “National Security Language Initiative,” though late by some estimates, revisited and re-articulated the general tone of Strength through Wisdom,5 the 1979 report of the President’s Commission on Foreign Languages and International Studies, which decried American citizens’ lack of proficiency in languages required for militaristic, economic and political competition:
Nothing less is at issue than the nation’s security. At a time when the resurgent forces of nationalism and of ethnic and linguistic consciousness so directly affect global realities, the United States requires far more reliable capacities to communicate with its allies, analyze the behavior of potential adversaries, and earn the trust and the sympathies of the uncommitted. Yet, there is a widening gap between these needs and the American competence to understand and deal successfully with other peoples in a world in flux.
National security moreover cannot safely be defined and protected within the narrow framework of defense, diplomacy and economics. A nation’s welfare depends in large measure on the intellectual and psychological strengths that are derived from perceptive visions of the world beyond its own boundaries. On a planet shrunken by the technology of instant communications, there is little safety behind a Maginot Line of scientific and scholarly isolationism. In our schools and colleges as well as in our public media of communications, and in the everyday dialogue within our communities, the situation cries out for a better comprehension of our place and our potential in a world that, though it still expects much from America, no longer takes American supremacy for granted.6
The only clear difference in the Bush initiative was in languages it deemed “critical” (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi). Yet before the Bush administration weighed in scholars in the field had been discussing for some time the impact of 9/11 on language and culture education. In 2005, for example, the University of California Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching sponsored a colloquium on the topic of National Language Educational Policy coordinated by Claire Kramsch and Robert Blake. The American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTfl) followed suit in 2006 with Heidi Byrnes’ plenary, The Power of Language: U.S. Language Policy Five Years After 9/11, and the MLA commissioned its own report, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World,” to study “the current language crisis that has occurred as a result of 9/11.”7 Also in 2007, Kramsch (also a member of the MLA ad hoc committee that authored their report) and Blake guest-edited the Perspectives section of The Modern Language Journal—of which Byrnes is Associate Editor—dedicated to presentations from their 2005 colloquium.
These activities, advanced by the President and leaders in the field, triangulate an important issue in language studies: the absence of an officially articulated foreign language education policy in the United States and what one should look like in a post-9/11 world. While the ACTfl national standards8 promote what Kramsch calls the “friendly rhetoric of global ‘communication, culture and communities,’”9 many in the above contexts, including and most notably the President, explicitly and implicitly advocated aligning foreign language policies, practices and goals with American military and economic policies. But this is nothing new—even before Perkins’ 1979 Strength through Wisdom report.
Terry Osborn, John Watzke and Claire Kramsch cogently chronicled how language education in the United States was promulgated in response to World Wars I and II and the Soviet launch of Sputnik. The latter nodal points engendered the introduction of Japanese and Russian, as two examples, at the collegiate then secondary levels. Russian programs largely ended after the Cold War and Japan’s post-War economic rise transitioned the focus of Japanese instruction from understanding the language and culture of “the enemy” to making business transactions. Parenthetically, I was a student and teacher of both Russian and Japanese and remember well my high-school textbook Japanese for Busy People, which contextualized speech acts in business transactions and Romanized complex Japanese syllabaries for quick mastery of pronunciation (although it did nothing for my writing ability). On the other hand, the economy of a Russia transitioning from communism to democracy was stagnant and, with it, enrollment and course offerings in Russian rapidly decreased; as Russian is now an economic and militarily “critical” language, schools that once cut their programs are scurrying to recreate them.
The same mentality of promulgating language instruction for militaristic and economic competition is behind the post-9/11 focus on and dramatic increase in elementary-, secondary- and university-level Arabic and Chinese—now at the expense of Japanese, German and other languages once prized for similar reasons.10 However, while Kramsch argues the current moment is similar to the days of Sputnik in that 9/11 jolted the American government to recognize the public’s inability in militarily, economically and politically competitive languages, as well as the consequent need to fund research and practice in them, she clarifies the more nefarious differences:
This time, however, the priority was not to raise the general level of foreign language competencies of the population at large nor to internationalize education in order to better communicate with our allies. The funds did not come from the US Department of Education but from the Department of Defense (DoD). They are not allocated to schools and universities (of which the government is suspicious) but to university-affiliated research centers (UARC) that ensure that the partnership between academia and the real world remains under the control of the federal government. The real-world problem is no longer how to understand the role of the USA in a world that speaks languages other than English, but how to create a cadre of language professionals that, with advanced knowledge of the language and the culture, are able to collect and interpret intelligence necessary for US national security. Of particular interest are the speakers of languages that the Department of Defense has declared critical to national security.11
But such policies are not common only to the United States. Anita Pavlenko argued the choice to use language education to effect military policy also occurred in Soviet Russia, where she recalls the following as her first day of English lessons in fifth grade:
My inculcation process started in 1975 when as a fifth grader I chose my foreign language, English, and attended the first class. The teacher welcomed us with a passionate speech: ‘My dear fifth graders, today is a very important day in your life—you are starting to study English. Your knowledge of this language will prove crucial when we are at war with the imperialist Britain and United States and you will have to decode and translate intercepted messages’.12
However, in the modern European context language policy debates are couched in the transition from education for national citizenship to membership in the larger European community, which for now, Kramsch argues, is more economic than political.
Like Pavlenko, Soka schools13 founder and peace activist, Daisaku Ikeda recalls the language policies of his childhood in Japan in the following way: “I had the personal misfortune of growing up at a time and in place—wartime Japan—when the learning of foreign languages, in particular the ‘enemy language’ of English, was actively discouraged.”14 Ikeda’s experiences illustrate the flipside of language instruction for military purposes—language non-education for reasons of militaristic and political competition. Ikeda’s experiences in Japan are reminiscent of American policies of non-education in German during World War I when it was removed from curricula, particularly for heritage speakers, because it was assumed continued instruction in the enemy language would foster unproductive sympathies and raise doubts in students’ formative minds about allegiances and the scope of patriotism.15 The United States wised up to such wasted resources, however, later calling on heritage speakers to hone their language skills for American efforts on the battlefield and in the marketplace.16 This is most recently obvious in the government’s solicitation of heritage speakers of Arabic and Korean for the war on terror and conflict with North Korea. Japan, similarly, has since made English as a foreign language compulsory from the elementary levels because of its role as the lingua franca of global economic competition. But Ikeda cautions,
The true goal of education should be the cultivation of individual character on the basis of respect for humanity. We must admit, however, that in modern Japan education has been used as a means for cultivating people to be of value to the nation and big business; that is, people who will function effectively within the national and economic structure.17
Here I would like to bring the discussion back to the current American context, focusing on Ikeda’s view of education for cultivation of individual character on the basis of respect for humanity. While the above-mentioned militarization, politicization and corporatization of language education have been promulgated in the name of national security and global peace, the effects are the opposite. I believe national and global security can only be achieved through constant and consistent dialogic interaction with the other on an individual level first and, thereby and thereafter, on national and global levels. That is, peace can only be achieved as the individual is (re)shaped and renewed in the dialogic spaces of the other.18 However, language education and non-education have heretofore replaced the individual’s dialogic self-actualization with what Ikeda calls the “spirit of abstraction.”
Appropriating the language of French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) and anticipating Klein,19 Ikeda argues a societal “spirit of abstraction,” the act of reducing the other’s character and humanity into abstract concepts—“the new and beautiful words”20—such as fundamentalist, fascist, Zionist, Communist, and so forth has wrought war, mammonism and, thereby, climate change, environmental degradation and the recent global economic crisis. Marcel argued that individuals wage war or otherwise denigrate others only after abstracting them to the degree of neglecting their humanity. Ikeda21 argued this spirit of abstraction promulgated the Russian Revolution, which oppressed, dehumanized and killed people based on abstract ideology. He revisited this application, arguing that abstract principles and ideas undergirding “religious fundamentalism, ethnocentrism, chauvinism, racism and a dogmatic adherence to various ideologies, including those of the market … take precedence over living human beings who in turn are forced into a subservient role.”22 In 2009, Ikeda23 again cited the spirit of abstraction as the root cause of the global economic crisis, whereby unbridled capitalism denigrated and oppressed the other because of people’s abstract valuation of money. Ikeda’s cogent articulation of this abstract spirit illustrates how it has led at once to the failure and dissolution of Russian Communism and its apparent “victor,” capitalism, when that capitalism is unbridled and operates on inhumane ethics. These same principles are evident in the ethos and outcomes of language policies and practices described herein, and in an American context, they are most recently obvious in the issues of immigration and “English only” policies.
The number of immigrant and native-born English language learners is the fastest growing segment in American schools. And while the government on one hand encourages native speakers of “critical” languages to polish their linguistic skills for the nation’s internationally competitive interests, on the other it has written Draconian “English only” stipulations into the No Child Left Behind Act and into measures seeking to make English the official and/or national language. Such exclusionary measures and politicking, popularized in the media by Lou Dobbs and others, are part and parcel of a U.S. immigration policy the Bush administration and, surprisingly, even more so the Obama administration, strictly enforced after 9/11. (Interestingly, Schwartz24 reported a 9 percent increase under the Obama administration in federally prosecuted immigration cases.) Although the U.S. government no longer quarantines entire ethnicities as it did with the Japanese during World War II (nor would it officially claim a desire to do so), its blatant suspicion of Arabic-speaking Arabs for militaristic reasons and of Spanish-speaking Hispanics for socioeconomic reasons has fomented in the public mind widespread distaste for and mistrust of immigrants and non-native speakers of English. This is particularly problematic in schools where English language learners are regularly ostracized, placed in special education and prohibited from using their native language, which quickly and egregiously ruptures their cultural and linguistic bonds to family and native country and devalues their language and cultural capital. In short, it creates an outward and inward spirit of abstraction.
Preston25 argues that President Obama, who is making immigration enforcement an early cornerstone of his administration, has developed a program to fasttrack U.S. citizenship for temporary immigrants willing to join the armed forces: “Recruiters expect that the temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans who enlist, helping the military to fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis.”26
Here the debate on militarization of language, education and the other has come full circle. And while Obama’s new program has not gained much play in literature on language and culture teaching, Ron Scollon’s comments are warranted as a response. Echoing Ikeda, Scollon rightly questioned whether foreign language teachers and scholars, many of whom explicitly oppose teaching in the interest of the state, are not by and large complicit in “the dominant ideology of the modern period [in the] equation of the tripartite entity, state, language, and culture.”27 Instead, also like Ikeda, he argues we should be working “in the service of ordinary people throughout the world for whom language and culture are diverse, multifarious, complex, continuous, semiotic resources which do not parse out into neat formal and structural entities.”28
Here I turn to Ikeda’s29 concept of “society for education.” Ikeda founded the Soka schools based on Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s (1871–1944) educational philosophy of value-creating pedagogy. A schoolteacher and principal, Makiguchi single-mindedly rejected Japanese militarized education and refused to capitulate to State Shinto promulgating it. Instead, Makiguchi focused his pedagogical theories on educating the whole child to create the values of beauty, individual gain and social good in each moment, which he considered to be the component parts of a value-creating and therefore authentically happy life (this notion of happiness should not be confused with egotistical or hedonistic pleasure). For Makiguchi, such happiness was the fundamental goal of education. Makiguchi was summarily arrested as a thought criminal under Japan’s Peace Preservation Law and imprisoned, where he died in 1944.
Ikeda’s application of Makiguchian philosophy is located in Makiguchi’s stance against education for society’s ideological, militaristic, economic and political purposes and in his own experiences growing up in such a system. Instead, Ikeda30 advocates a paradigm shift, a new philosophical current that moves from education serving the nation’s ideological, militaristic, economic and political needs, to society serving the essential needs of education. Here we must ask ourselves, what is the purpose of education in general and language education in particular?
Education, or learning, Ikeda argues, “is the very purpose of human life, the primary factor in the development of personality, that which makes human beings truly human. Nevertheless, development of personality has consistently been reduced to a subordinate position and viewed as a means to other ends.”31 Such has been the case through language education described herein. In this sense, Ikeda continues, “a certain type of personality, not the full development of personality, has been sought, as if casting individuals from a uniform mold.”32 This, and the era of mass killing and dehumanization promulgated by a consonant spirit of abstraction, was caused by educators and governments “ceasing to regard human beings as the basis of value and instead assigning merely subordinate roles to education, which should be a fundamental and primary human activity.”33
Finally, Ikeda argues the full development of personality—the experience of a truly human life Makiguchi calls genuine happiness—can only be realized in the dialogic bonds and interactions between people. Alas, here the role of education in general and foreign and second language education in particular is clear.
Although less than a decade old, 9/11 is experientially absent or distant in the minds of elementary and secondary students. Yet in the short time since 9/11, the global reality and national mindset undergirding their education have moved even closer to a “pre-World War III” view, which accepts the imminent occurrence, given present circumstances, of global nuclear conflict among extremist groups and sovereign states vying for shifting political power, limited natural and economic resources, and the sociocultural market on religious views and practices. While the historical trend and current policies would push individuals, education in general and language learning in particular into preparation for the ideologically, militarily, politically and economically competitive mold of offensive-defensive preemption, I believe such a moment presents an opportunity. At this moment, society can fundamentally transform itself by choosing to meet the essential needs of an education that allows individuals—our students—to fully develop their personalities, identities and capabilities in globally dialogic interactions toward “humanitarian competition.”34 For in this way, current and future generations will prevent global catastrophe by awakening to, critiquing and resisting their complicity in elements at its root.
1 See for example Jason Goulah, “Transformative World Language Learning: An Approach for Environmental and Cultural Sustainability and Economic and Political Security,” Journal of Language and Literacy Education 4, 1 (2008): 6-23 and Jason Goulah, “Dialogic Resistance in Education: Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Daisaku Ikeda and Transformative Language Learning,” In In Praise of Resistance: Phenomena for Truth, edited by T. A. Osborn and D. M. Moss (New York: Peter Lang, in press).
2 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), 20.
3 Ibid.
4 See for example Robert Blake and Claire Kramsch, eds, “The Issue: National Language Educational Policy,” The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007): 247–283; Richard D. Brecht and William P. Rivers, Language and National Security in the 21st Century: The Role of Title VI/Fulbright-Hays in Supporting National Language Capacity (Dubuque, Ia.: Kendall/Hunt, 2000); Heidi Byrnes, “The Power of Language: U.S. Language Policy Five Years after 9/11.” Plenary session panel at ACTfl 2006, available at: http:www1.georgetown.edu/departments/german/faculty/byrnes/lecturesandpresentations/Byrnes.ACTFL.11-06.pdf (accessed April 25, 2010); Goulah, “Transformative World Language Learning”; Claire Kramsch, “Post 9/11: Foreign Languages between Knowledge and Power,” Applied Linguistics 26, 4 (2005): 545–567; Ryuko Kubota, “Teaching Second Languages for National Security Purposes: A Case of Post-9/11 USA,” in (Re-)Locating TESOL in an Age of Empire, edited by J. Edge (London: Palgrave, 2006), 119–138; Modern Language Association, Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World (2007), available at http://www.mla.org/flreport (accessed April 25, 2010); Terry A. Osborn, ed., The Future of Foreign Language Education in the United States (Westport, Ct.: Bergin & Garvey, 2002); Anita Pavlenko, “‘Language of the Enemy’: Foreign Language Education and National Identity,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 6, 5 (2003): 313–331; Ron Scollon, “Teaching Language and Culture as Hegemonic Practice,” The Modern Language Journal, 88, 2 (2004): 271–274; T. A. Taha, “Arabic as ‘a Critical-Need’ Foreign Language in the Post-9/11 Era: A Study of Students’ Attitudes and Motivation,” Journal of Instructional Psychology 34, 3 (2007): 150–160; John Watzke, Lasting Change in Foreign Language Education: A Historical Case for Change in National Policy (Westport: Praeger, 2003).
5 James Perkins, “Strength through Wisdom: A Critique of U.S. Capability. A Report to the President from the President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies,” Modern Language Journal 64, 1 (1980): 9–57.
6 Ibid., 11.
7 Modern Language Association, Foreign Languages and Higher Education, Background, paragraph 1.
8 National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project, Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (Yonkers, NY: Author, 1999).
9 Kramsch, “Post 9/11,” 561.
10 See for example, Goulah, “Transformative World Language Learning” and Taha, “Arabic as ‘a Critical-Need’ Foreign Language.
11 Kramsch, “Post 9/11,” 556.
12 Pavlenko, “‘Language of the Enemy,’” 313.
13 Soka schools comprise universities in Japan and the United States, K–secondary schools in Japan, a kindergarten and elementary school in Brazil, and kindergartens in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. Language education and study abroad, in a framework of humanistic dialogism, are compulsory for all students at Soka University of America.
14 Personal communication, May 31, 2009.
15 See for example, Deborah M. Herman, “‘Our Patriotic Duty’: Insights from Professional History, 1890–1920,” in The Future of Foreign Language Education in the United States, edited by T. A. Osborn (Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 2002), 1–29; and Watzke, Lasting Change.
16 Kramsch, “Post 9/11.”
17 Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Education: A Buddhist Vision for Teachers, Students and Parents (Santa Monica: Middleway Press, 2001), 125.
18 See for example, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 10–59.
19 Klein, The Shock Doctrine.
20 Ibid., 20.
21 Daisaku Ikeda, A Renaissance of Hope and Harmony, 1992 Peace Proposal (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 1992).
22 Daisaku Ikeda, Humanizing Religion, Creating Peace, 2008 Peace Proposal (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 2008), 12–13, available at: http://daisakuikeda.org/assets/files/pp2008.pdf (accessed April 25, 2010).
23 Daisaku Ikeda, Toward Humanitarian Competition: A New Current in History, 2009 Peace Proposal (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 2009), available at http://daisakuikeda.org/assets/files/pp2009.pdf (accessed April 25, 2010).
24 John Schwartz, “Immigration Enforcement Fuels Rise in U.S. Cases,” The New York Times (December 21, 2009).
25 Julia Preston, “U.S. Military Will Offer Path to Citizenship,” The New York Times (February 14, 2009).
26 Preston, “U.S. Military Will Offer Path to Citizenship.”
27 Scollon, “Teaching Language and Culture as Hegemonic Practice,” 271.
28 Ibid.
29 Daisaku Ikeda, Building a Society Serving the Essential Needs of Education: Some Views on Education in the Twenty-First Century (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 2000).
30 See for example, Ikeda, Building a Society; Daisaku Ikeda, Kibo no seki e kyoiku no hikari [Toward a Century of Hope: The Light of Education] (Tokyo: Hoshoin, 2004); Victor A. Sadovnichy and Daisaku Ikeda, Gaku wa hikari, bunmei to kyoiku no mirai wo kataru [Learning is Light: On the Future of Civilization and Education] (Tokyo: Ushio, 2004).
31 Ikeda, Building a Society, 6.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 6–7.
34 Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Makiguchi Tsunesaburo zenshu [The Complete Works of Makiguchi Tsunesaburo], 10 Vols (Tokyo: Daisan Bunmeisha, 1981–88).