Faith in School: Educational Policy Responses to Muslim Unrest in the Philippine Republic

Abstract

This chapter examines official articulations of educational policy, curricula, and texts by both Commonwealth and independent Philippine governments from the mid-1930s to the mid-1980s, arguing that these policies and practices continued to frame the problem of tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim Filipinos in the terms established by the American pedagogy of imperialism in the first decades of the century. This framing of the problem resulted in top-down, paternalistic policies that tended to promote majority Christian views on the content and aims of education while marginalizing Muslim Filipinos desires for the education of Muslim children.