Religious or secular school system

Title

Creator

Philippine Weekly Review

Year

1968

Subject

Religious schools.

Secular education.

Education -- Philippines.

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

The advantages of a secular as against a sectarian school.

Fulltext

■ The advantages of a secular as against a sectarian school. RELIGIOUS OR SECULAR SCHOOL SYSTEM? The question of religious versus secular education has beeTi discussed quite often in our country. One side claims that the answer was given long ago during the Spanish regime when the Catholic Church had control over the education of the Filipinos. The results were far from be ing satisfactory. The other side could cite the United States as an example to prove the success of secular author ities in the maintenance of a national system of education as a medium for the develop ment of democratic ideas and practices. Our public schools and state universities have been accused as godless centers of education. This kind of ac cusation is, however, mean ingless. For whether they are so or not has nothing to do with the question as to whether they give effective instruction to the Filipino youth or not. The public schools have produced pre sumably the same propor tion of law-abiding citizens and criminals as the private schools which are. run by nuns, sisters, priests, brothers, and preachers. The former president of Antioch College, Dr. Arthur E. Morgan, who later became head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, has pointed out to us the case of Newfoundland; a nation which has failed miserably to maintain its status as a free member of the British Commonwealth after its government had placed under religious con trol its entire school system. After discussing the advan tages of the secular nature and administration of Ame rican state universities and land-grant colleges as instru ments for promoting demo .26 Panorama cracy, he admitted that while they have not been complete ly satisfactory, at the same time they have not failed. He then went on to say: “What are the alternatives to this democratic, secular educational system which is so frequently and so drasti cally decried by representa tives of authoritarian reli gion in our country? One of the British dominions took a strikingly different course. Newfoundland escaped secu lar education. Tax money collected by the govern ment was distributed to the churches in proportion to their population; about 40 per cent each to the Church of England and to the Bo man Catholic Church, and the rest mostly to the Method ists. These church authorities were left to provide the edu cational system from bottom to top. Nowhere in all the English-speaking world was there such sorry failure in education or in citizenship as in this dominion, populated almost exclusively by hardy English-speaking people from the British Isles. Finally, af ter a century of inefficiency, graft, wide-scale smuggling, mismanagement, financial fa voritism, and lack of educa tional advance, the whole do minion went bankrupt and surrendered its status — the only such failure, as I recall, of an English-speaking popu lation in the British Empire.” —Philippine Weekly Review. POWER Human nature is much the same in government as in the dry-goods trade. Power and strict account ability for its use are the essential constituents of good government. — Woodrow Wilson March 1968

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