Culture in the United States in the second half of the 20th century will be characterized by future historians as privately religious and publicly secular. While a huge majority of individual citizens claim to be Christian, the culture has tended to become increasingly secularist. This secularism features a pronounced indifference, rather than a manifested antipathy, toward religion. Dawson has distinguished this indirect form of secularism from the directly secularist approaches found in modern history in continental Europe.1

A prime example of secularism in late 20th-century American culture is found in public higher education. The subtitle of Marsden's recent book, From Protestant Establishment to Established Non-belief, signifies the pattern of development. 2 According to the author, Americans have become so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of secularism that we are even distorting our own history. He elaborates the gross omission of attention to the role of religion in the history of American higher education - which overlays the centrality of Christianity in state colleges and universities well into the 20th century. A similar misrepresentation is manifested in a comparison of the writings of outstanding educators in the history of Western Europe (such as Comenius, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Montessori) with recent commentaries on their educational contributions. The latter fail to acknowledge the religious and philosophical principles that inspired the lives and the pioneering pedagogical efforts of these individuals.

For most of the first five months of 1996, I resided in the Philippines, teaching for one trimester at De La Salle University (DLSU) in Manila and for five weeks (summer session) at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman, Quezon City. At DLSU, a Catholic university conducted by the Christian Brothers, I taught a graduate course and an undergraduate course in the Department of Philosophy (College of Arts and Sciences) and a graduate course and undergraduate course (in philosophy of education) in the College of Education. At UP, the state university with its flagship campus at Diliman, I taught a graduate course (in philosophy of education) in the College of Education. One of my purposes in going to the Philippines to teach was to ascertain similarities and differences between cultures (especially higher education) in the two countries relative to the phenomenon of secularism. In the elementary and secondary public schools in the Philippines, time is set aside for the teaching of religion during school hours on the school grounds. Students can choose to attend religion classes sponsored and taught by persons representing specific religions (the most popular of which is Catholicism), or they can take a course called Values Education, which is not affiliated with any particular religion. My understanding is that they must take either a course in a specific religion or Values Education, the latter presumably grounded in some kind of religious and/or philosophical reflection.

My brief experiences in the Philippines manifested the importance of religion in higher education there as well - in campus life generally, in curriculum planning, and in classroom discussion. The observance of the Angelus, visits to the chapel, and attendance at daily Mass on the DLSU campus exemplify the first. Secondly, according to one of my former graduate students at the University of the Philippines who is on the faculty of the College of Home Economics on that same campus, the faculty of that college had been attempting to establish goals to permeate all courses taught in the college. Among these goals were love of country and love of God--at the state university! Thirdly, concerning classroom discussion, I noted carefully the responses of my graduate students at UP to questions raised in the introduction to the course concerning their own personal "fundamental values." They spoke freely, openly, and with strong convictions about their religion and the Bible. One even quoted the Bible. This is not my experience in the United States--even in a Catholic university!

I am not certain what all of this means. However, it appears that there is generally more consistency in the Philippines than in the United States between private religious judgments and the public forum (including public education). Whereas both cultures represent a substantial challenge for the philosophy of education, educators in the Philippines can take advantage of the readiness of Filipinos to discuss their religion publicly in order to help students reflect upon their religion and to pursue philosophy--and to relate both their religion and their philosophy to their personal living, and to planning and implementing formal processes of education.

The fact that religious pluralism permeates U.S. culture to a far greater degree than is true in the Philippines ought not to cause Americans to abandon public attention to religious and philosophical questions, especially in formal education.

Notes