From the Massachusetts Department of Education website: Spirit of Knowledge Charter School Executive Summary

[www.doe.mass.edu]

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Spirit of Knowledge Charter School
Executive Summary

This is prepared by the founding group of the proposed Spirit of Knowledge Charter
School.

Mission:
The Spirit of Knowledge Charter School’s 7th through 12th grade Worcester students will create value in their lives and the lives of others through high-standards academic learning, especially in math, science and technology, gaining admission to college, and developing a positive character.

Vision:

3. Instill positive school culture and character development. The School will embrace an inspiring school culture based on a value-creating philosophy and positive character-building system.

Educational Philosophy, Curriculum and Instruction:

The School’s educational philosophy is based on Soka Education, a Japanese educational and ethical theory developed by the Japanese educator Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944), a contemporary of John Dewey’s and supporter of many of his educational principles. “Soka” is a contraction of “sozo kachi”, meaning “creation of value” in Japanese. The main ideas of Soka Education are creating value in the lives of students, community and society. The basic tenet of creating value serves as the core organizational principle and the “glue” holding together all components of the School design: high- standards curriculum based on the International structure; the cutting-edge, research-based organizational and instructional methods; and the school culture and emphasis on character development. Each one of these components is grounded in extensive research and demonstrated success. We believe that education is THE critical path to creating value in one’s own life, and in the lives of others.
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The Spirit of Knowledge Academy has nothing to do with SGI, despite being based on the principles of the founder of SGI, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi? If you believe this, I'd like to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.

This is how SGI is trying to thread the needle, to get their own SGI schools, and be able to reach into society to promote the SGI agenda.
Get at the kids when they are young.

Let these SGI-ers explain what CREATING VALUE really means.
Isn't it also the creation of values?
Who's values?

The values of SGI.
And as seen by this thread, in fact the "values" of SGI under Ikeda are quite perverse, focused completely on wealth accumulation at all costs, personal Ego, deception, trickery, dishonesty, and basically the opposite of everything that is actually classically Buddhist.

All of this is actually very clever, as SGI has figured out that this is literally how you control and manage people, by shaping their Values.
That is actually what the professional NLP based persuasion experts also teach. The way to really persuade, control, and manage people is by modifying their BELIEFS, and their VALUES. (a value is a type of belief).

What better way to do this, then to target youths and teens?
Its a religious school program, and the "religion" is a cultish one by the name of SGI Soka Re-Education.
Would the community be ok with the local Scientology Values school?
Or the Moonies Values school for kidz?

How long before people wake up and realize the local Soka Re-Education religious school is controlled by an authoritarian global anti-Buddhist sect worth billions, that just calls themselves Buddhist as that sounds righteous?

SGI should just say, hey Soka Re-Education religious schools have nothing to do with our Soka Gakkai SGI religious sect.

Just like the Suzuki Method for violin has nothing to do with Suzuki car manufacturing.

Just confuse the stupid westerners with word games and Japanese terminology.

But one thing for sure, in the old USA, when you start screwing around with their kids core values, and its not about Apple Pie, parents are going to get very angry. Most people understand on a gut level that whoever influences the "values" of their kids, ends up influencing their kids.

SGI is not going to be able to resist pushing SGI on students, just like what happened at Soka University.
And when you start to mess around with peoples core values, it gets explosive.

Although there are many things to criticize, I don't think the concept of 'creating value' is one of them. Some examples of creating value would be eating at the dinner table with your kids and spouse and taking the time to be interested in each others lives rather than the grab and go concept that many of use at mealtime. Or, taking the time to chant for your unhappy co-worker to find the next day they apologize to you and the relationship becomes much better (this happened to me once).

Basically, creating value is like making lemonade from lemons; it is improvement. This is not the same as the values that certain religious or political figures speak of. Their so called values are very mixed up and often at the expense of certain minority groups. For instance, some think (not me) that one has the right values when they realize that homosexuality is plain wrong and against "god" or whatever. This is a value for some, and it is mixed up and hurts another group of people. There are others that claim to have "values" about marriage, and yet they don't think twice about that little affair they had last year. You get the picture.

I hope this somewhat clarifies the idea of creating value vs. molding someone else's values. Values are personal beliefs that are completely individual and mostly learned, whether right or wrong. Creating value is a choice to improve yourself or your situation.

@tsukimoto

It might make sense to send a link to Rick Ross to some of the state representatives there in Massachusetts so they can see the great organization that will be running their charter school.

I can just see it now, a vast playground of children, boys in white shirts and girls in skirts, beret's and white blouses, all with fists raised skyward saying "ay ay oh - shakubuku shakubuku all the way" and then bursting into several choruses of "forever sensei".

BTW, the tiger is known by it's paw print. SGI is the image of its founder and his consorts. Fool me twice, shame on me....

<shudder>

Wakatta1



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/01/2011 09:23AM by wakatta1.

Well, value is certainly a loaded term. It's important to have and live by your values....but Backnforth, it's certainly a good point that some people use their values as a club to beat other people with!

I brought up the use of the term "creating value" because it is so specifically SGI rhetoric. I have never heard another group speak of creating value. "Living by values," "having values," "being true to your values," yes, those are words I've heard from other groups -- but "creating value" seems to be a hallmark of SGI. So, if an organization is talking about creating value, I strongly suspect that they are affiliated with SGI....or at least SGI members are involved.

Very interesting about the SOKA Charter school's application. The application on the Massachusetts Department of Education's website says that value-creation education was the brainchild of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. Now, if you've been around SGI, you know that Makiguchi was the founder of SGI, and so you would immediately know that the Soka school has a connection to Ikeda and SGI. People who have never been SGI members would not know this.

I could have sworn, though, that the application mentioned "Japanese writer and educator, Daisaku Ikeda." In this thread, I posted a link to that page on the Massachusetts Education Department website. Well, I went back in this thread and clicked on that link....it no longer works. You can find the application on the Massachusetts DOE website....but Ikeda is not mentioned, Makiguchi is.

However, as Anticult told me many pages back --- don't just copy the link, copy the content also, because pages on other sites can conveniently disappear. And so I did. And no, I wasn't imagining things. The initial application DID mention Ikeda.

[forum.culteducation.com]

The SOKA humanistic philosophy is best articulated by Daisaku Ikeda, respected educator, and prolific author: “What our world most requires now is the kind of education that fosters love for humankind that develops character - that provides an intellectual basis for the realization of peace and empowers learners to contribute to and improve society."

So now the Spirit of Knowledge Academy does not even want anyone to know of their connection to Ikeda? Interesting.

Yes, always copy in full the relevant material, as it does tend to get "disappeared" right after its brought to light. Its only happened about 100x with 20 different sects.

So they deleted the references to Daisaku Ikeda after it was pointed out?

And instead reference this other guy hat no one outside of SGI has ever heard of?

Soka Re-Education is walking on thin ice. If these types of games hit the press, they are going to be in serious trouble.
Of course for SGI-USA, its common practice to fudge the facts, and mislead people, but are people going to accept that in a faux-secular educational setting?

No they aren't, once the facts come out.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/01/2011 11:17AM by The Anticult.

As far as "value-creation" its all a slippery slope.
Of course, SGI sells a version of what that means, that sounds like a good thing.
If a school is going to sell a religious idea embedded in the schools structure, they need to be UP FRONT about it, so people know what they are getting in for. There is no way that regular people know what they are getting in for, with a SGI school.
But of course for SGI, its all part of a long-term plan, to bring SGI to the center of each society, and you get there by going after the kids. And what better way, than by setting up these SGI Soka schools.



But in fact, what the overall SGI is, is re-engineering the Values of their members. They turn Buddhism upside down and backasswards, so in that sense SGI is literally creating values.

One of the first people to talk about "creating values" was the philosopher Nietzsche. [en.wikipedia.org]
They reject the values of the christian world of the day, and install a Master Morality, and create their own values. The man becomes a God.

This is Daisaku Ikeda in spades.
Since he sees himself as the Buddha, that means he can create values, and he has done so, inverting Buddhism into its opposite, while calling it the same thing.

So in fact, from this perspective, SGI Soka Gakkai is in fact about "creating values" as they have creating an entire new value system for members, and a different one for SGI leaders.
For example, its ok for an SGI leader to lie to protect SGI in their mind, but its not ok for the SGI member to lie to their leader.

Bottom line, is that Ikeda sees himself as a type of Nietzschian Ubermensch Buddha Billionaire, who can do whatever he wants. He creates his own history, and creates his own values, and in his mind he'e redefined Buddhism into his own thing.

So there may be a semantic distinction between "creating value" and "creating values", but in fact that perfectly describes what SGI is really all about.

Human Revolution = Creating (SGI) Values in people

And now they are aiming at kids in the west with these charter schools.

If in fact, they deleted Ikeda's name from the application, then those facts can be sent to news media who are covering the story.
It won't take much until people begin to find out who is really running the show.
Why did they delete his name?
Where is the money coming from, and going to?
How many running the charter school are senior SGI?



Its interesting to see the multi-layered language propaganda SGI is engaging in.
For example, Britannica has a different definition:

[www.britannica.com] Soka-gakkai (Japanese: “Value-Creation Society”)

Now that makes sense! Value-Creation Society. That is exactly what SGI is, they want to create a new society, with new values, created by the Buddha Godman himself, Ikeda.
Social engineering.

Also, its interesting in Britannica:
"The association was founded in 1930 by Makiguchi Tsunesaburo, a former elementary-school..."

So going after the elementary kids belief systems is where SGI began. They know that if you can get into the beliefs of children, then you often have them for life.

People need to know the hidden and concealed systems inside a school where they send their kids.

Just wait until the kids get to the fiction history class with SGI brochures getting glued into the textbooks.
Lincoln, Washington, Martin Luther King, and Daisaku Ikeda the great American hero.
They probably have it all planned out with a 20 year SGI masterplan.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/01/2011 11:57AM by The Anticult.

Quote
tsukimoto

Quote
Shavoy
And that Mr. Williams will be thrown under the bus under the protection of "It's Fiction!"...It's been said on this thread more than once already, but Mr. W. was probably kicked to the side and out the door because he was grabbing more than his share of the Top Dog Pie.
.

Some people say that GW's real crime was becoming more popular than Ikeda.

Many pages back, we had a poster, Commongirl, who claimed that she and her family knew George Williams -- and that he was having an affair with the Young Women's Division leader, that he treated the Women's Division members like his personal servants, and that he didn't think that the non-Japanese members were truly capable of understanding Buddhism. Maybe she's right, maybe she's not. I have no way of knowing.

My feeling though, is that if Williams was guilty of wrongdoing -- it should have been brought out at the time. Let him tell his side of things. If people were wronged by him -- let them tell their story. It's cowardly to attack him now. He's elderly, ill, I believe he has dementia. He can no longer defend himself. It's hardly a coincidence that Ikeda has just now put out the new volume of Human Revolution, and tossed old George under the bus.

I think that played a larger than large part of it, Tsukimoto. I remember reading some of Commongirl's posts where she told of the affair with Margaret Ionashi (sp?) and also about the servitude. You're right, there is no way of knowing. And yes, it should have seen the light of day at the time. But as we know, this does not seem to be the way SGI prefers to operate.

I have to say I was inspired by Mr. Williams, being a new member back in his heydey, and got a lot from his guidance.

To step on him when he is elderly and not in good health, is dirty play. Although it sounds like he's considered a Slanderer of the first order, so he deserves it, right? Enemy, right?

Somehow, Richard Nixon comes to mind. Destroy all enemies.