Monte Joffee on Value-Creating Education: Beauty, Gain, and Good in the Classroom

We sat down recently with educator Monte Joffee — New York City teacher turned co-founder of the Renaissance Charter School — whose work translates Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s value-creating (soka) education into everyday educational practice. We spoke with him as SIGS advances its global citizenship education efforts, including the recent Pre-K–12 Global Citizenship Education Conference at SUA last summer, which Joffee attended and described as “a giant unified wave of deep commitment of educators from around the world.”

Thank you so much for speaking to us! Can you share a little bit about your journey toward becoming an educator?

I remember feeling lost and miserable in my elementary school years, but I thoroughly enjoyed middle and high school. Then I was unhappy again in college. Quite the mystery!

My journey toward teaching began with trying to unlock that puzzle. How could I make every classroom a happy and productive place for students and teachers to work?

We understand you began as a public school teacher in NYC and later co-founded the Renaissance Charter School. What problem in schooling were you trying to solve when you made that leap, and what did you learn in the transition from classroom to founding principal?

When I began teaching in 1969, the country was adrift with a crisis of values. At that time, I was suffering with undiagnosed depression (now identified as “dissociative disorder”). I was neither charismatic, empathetic, disciplined, nor organized — all possible paths for good teaching. I really struggled as a young teacher!

In a deadlock and suffering greatly, one day I determined to figure out how to be a good teacher and I had a moment of realization. I had it all backwards. It was not about me being a good teacher. My focus had to shift to the students growing like plants! With that focus, ultimately, I discovered I had a very good sense of curriculum and for the “teachable moment.” With these attributes I could teach effectively just as I am.

At the time I started practicing Buddhism in 1970 there were no published books on value-creating education. But on random trips to the library, one day I discovered “Indians: A Pictorial Recreation of American Indian Life Before the Arrival of the White Man” by Edwin Tunis (1959) and “Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805” by Eric Sloane (1962). My students devoured the illustrations that depicted the life of our community hundreds of years ago! In 1973 I read an early edition of Dayle Bethel’s “Makiguchi the Value Creator,” which contained a synopsis of Makiguchi’s vision of education grounded in the community. This was what I was looking for!

I developed lessons on topics ranging from the historical development of my city to its local fauna and infrastructure. I had a moment in my doctoral studies when I realized that a school could be founded on this approach. Later, I came to maintain that so could all of American P-12 education.

Other fortuitous occurrences? One year, a fourth grade student gifted me a set of five novels, “The Chronicles of Prydain” by Lloyd Alexander. Reading these books led me to becoming an avid reader of the Newbery Award books and other classics of children’s literature. My students became hooked on them.

I had a chance grad school workshop on Caleb Gattegno’s “Cuisenaire rods,” which showed me a visual and sensory way to teach concepts such as fractions. When I began to teach elementary school music, I fortuitously encountered the music pedagogy of Zoltán Kodály and began teaching sight-singing.

At that point, I began my doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, and earned my certification to be a school principal. The 1980s were heady times, the start of the “second wave” of school reform, which looked at “whole school” reform strategies. A group of teacher friends and I worked collaboratively, and we became the co-founders of the Renaissance School (now known as the Renaissance Charter School), which opened in 1993.

Three years later, Daisaku Ikeda delivered his lecture “Thoughts on Education for Global Citizenship,” in which he outlined global citizenship education as a much larger framework to underpin educational efforts.

The Renaissance Charter School drew on Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s philosophy of Soka education. What are two or three concrete ways you translated that philosophy into practical approaches and pedagogy in your school?

Our school’s motto is “Developing Leaders for the Renaissance of New York.” It’s a vision and not a formula. Visitors to the school consistently remark that the school seems to be such a happy place. Makiguchi’s Theory of Value proposes three building blocks:

• Beauty: For example, we make sure the hallway walls are bright and full of art and student work. Voices are beautiful and there’s no screaming.
• Gain: We try to create leaders among our teachers and create a culture where there is communication, growth, and a spirit to keep advancing, never giving up on a child — or teacher.
• Good: The school has a culture of respect, discourse, and friendliness that encourages students to become leaders and creators of good.

At the SIGS Global Citizenship Education Conference this July, educators gathered around themes like nonviolence, service to others, respect for cultural differences, environmental stewardship, and personal growth. Which of these pillars do schools most often overlook, and how can educational leaders correct that?

We are in a time of vast paradigm shift and schools are unmoored to a sound educational philosophy. Our current educational policy blames teachers and school leaders as the root causes of educational stagnation. But back in 1966, James Coleman, in his “Equality of Educational Opportunity” report, highlighted the profound influence of families, communities, and peer groups on the academic success of individual students. We need a national consensus, I believe, to address these three influences. I am afraid that we are dealing with the failure of education policy and it has become apostasy to talk outside of the box. Any true revitalization of education must rely on a strategy of making it easy for everyone to work hard, foster students’ will to achieve, and exponentially expand the human resources of parents (and their supporters) as co-educators. It’s really not that hard to do!

What was one idea you heard at the SIGS Global Citizenship Education Conference that inspired or surprised you?

It was not a concrete idea but a giant unified wave of deep commitment of educators from around the world.

You’ve argued for pairing academic excellence with a humanistic education. What does success look like when schools are judged not only by test scores but also by the kinds of humans students become? How do you measure such growth?

Many commentators suggest ways to study students and teachers. Rather, I would examine the core of the school. Every school has a core of both formal and informal leaders. Are they in high spirits? Do they work as a team? Are they able to bounce with the punches? Do they recognize both brightness and manifestations of evil? Is there laughter and discourse when they sit down and talk? Is their focus on student work?

If a principal or teacher asked you where to start on Monday morning with incorporating global citizenship education in their classrooms and school culture, what advice would you give them?

I hear a lot of voices in my head shouting for attention. Nel Noddings, the mathematics educator and scholar on “caring,” would tell this teacher to bring a plant to the classroom! The great Ukrainian educator Vasyl Sukhomlynsky would recommend the teacher take young children on walks through natural landscapes, sketching and making up fairy tales about what they see. Author Herbert Kohl once visited me teaching a class where the students and I were in a deadlock; he carries with him corny magic tricks for exactly those situations and it broke the ice. Sarah Schenirer, the founder of many “Bais Yaakov” schools for ultraorthodox Jewish girls in pre-war Poland, would serve hot tea while her students talked, sewed, sang, and studied scripture. All of these are good starting points.