Did you know there was a Japanese educator who defined the sole purpose of education as the happiness of the learner?

That’s the question 10 high school students asked their peers at Francis W. Parker School’s morning assembly late last semester.

The Japanese teacher was Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, who was active in the early 20th century. Students explored his ideas along with those of three other progressive educators — Francis W. Parker, John Dewey and Daisaku Ikeda — in a class titled “Schools across borders, schools across time.”

“Every once in a while you come up with a good idea, but what you don’t always get is a good class,” said Parker teacher Andrew Kaplan. “When the two come together, it is just magic. And it was a magic semester.”

Kaplan co-taught the first-time course with Jason Goulah, a DePaul University assistant professor of bilingual-bicultural education.

“In this environment of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Obama’s rhetoric of winning the future, and the sort of cut-throat competition,” Goulah said, “[the students] were very much working in concert with one another. [They were] spurring one another’s understanding and thinking, quoting from the text and encouraging one another to dig deeper.”

Parker (1837-1902) was a colonel in the Civil War who was shot in the throat during combat. After the war, “his response was to resume the noble role of educator,” said Kaplan. Parker believed that education should strive for the complete development of a student — mental, physical and moral. It should help them become lifelong learners and active, democratic citizens.

Dewey (1859-1952), the best-known of the group, believed that education should foster cooperation. In a world of ruthless competition, education should encourage “the spirit which sees in every other individual an equal right to share in the cultural and material fruits of collective human invention, industry, skill and knowledge.”

Makiguchi (1871-1944) was an elementary school teacher who created a system based on soka, which means value-creation in Japanese. At a time when Japan’s government was becoming increasingly fascist, Makiguchi insisted that society should serve the needs of individuals, not individuals serve the needs of society. He was imprisoned by Japanese thought police and died in 1944 in captivity.

Fewer than 30 years after Makiguchi’s death, Ikeda (1928-present) opened the first Soka school in Japan based on Makiguchi’s dreams for education. Now, over a dozen Soka schools exist around the world, including two four-year universities. One of them, Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, Calif., is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.

After taking “Schools across borders, schools across time,” Jordan Collins-Brown, 17, changed his college plans. Rather than aiming for Harvard University, his life-long aspiration, he wants to study at Soka University of America.

“People go to Harvard because of the name, not the principles it was founded on,” he said. “Soka, to me, is about how I can pay tribute to those who have come before me by helping to make the world a more peaceful place, not just for myself, but for future generations to come.”

Collins-Brown can’t wait to start college next fall. “Soka can prepare me for the global stage,” he said.

For Goulah, the connection that Collins-Brown formed with Makiguchi and Ikeda’s writings is the direction education should be taking.

“If we just take what our predecessors said or wrote in a book, that’s nothing more than value-consumption,” he said. “Value-consumption and value-creation are different.”

Goulah sees a form of Soka education alive at Parker, because the students didn’t just consume. They deeply considered and discussed the philosophies of these educators.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first group of kids who has, as part of their high school curriculum, studied to that degree Makiguchi and Ikeda’s writings,” he said. “And because of that, this one student is choosing Soka University of America. That’s pretty powerful.”

Although “Schools across borders” was supposed to be a one-time course, Kaplan said the students all agreed it should be taught again and again. Of their own volition, they began recruiting ninth graders this week to register for the course next fall.

“It really speaks to the need,” Kaplan said, “that students have to find alternative stories about what education might be.”

“Schools across borders” came out of plans by Goulah and Kaplan for an international symposium examining the connections among the four educators. The symposium is scheduled from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 26 at Parker. It will be the first of its kind in the U.S. to focus on two major American educational philosophers alongside their Japanese counterparts.

“There are very few Japanese thinkers that are really informing how we consider education in the U.S.,” Goulah said. “I think Ikeda provides some kind of response to the data-driven, test-heavy, ‘creating cogs in the wheel’” atmosphere of American education today, he said. “Good education transcends culture and language.”

“One thing that has been neglected [in] these conversations about education in the U.S. is … international perspectives … that have grown out of the people themselves,” said William H. Schubert. A professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he is past president of the John Dewey Society and will speak at the event.

Among the scholars joining Schubert will be Larry Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, and Takao Ito, associate professor and director of The Center for Dewey Studies in the Soka Education Research Institute at Soka University, Tokyo.

The Parker students who studied the four educators will participate along with the scholars in the symposium.

These educators are “heroic figures” to Kaplan.

“I am hoping as we witness the discipline and the heritage of these four thinkers,” Kaplan said, “That we are able to explore and expand the possibilities for education in this country.”