July 9, 2001
Professor: Religious schools are not inferior
___LEXINGTON, Ky. (BP)--Education in a religiously-based college or university should not be considered inferior to education in a secular university, according to a prominent professor at Notre Dame University.
___George Marsden, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, delivered a keynote address to the Association of Southern Baptist Colleges and Schools annual meeting in which he called on Baptist educators to see their work with new value.
___"The time has come to rethink the premise that the best education is secular and that religiously based education is automatically inferior," he said.
___"Religious colleges, instead of feeling that they are under pressure to become more like their secular counterparts, should take pride in the religious character of their education, attempting to strengthen it rather than weaken it," he added.
___"In our places of worship, (Americans) say their religion is not just for one day a week, but for all that we do. Yet in most of their education, Americans send the message that when it comes to the really important things in life--what one should think about other people, society, politics, economics, careers, the environment, ourselves, our moral values, our nature and destiny--Americans teach their young people to think about them as though God did not exist."
___Religion is typically treated like a "harmless hobby" in most of the nation's educational system, Marsden said. "At best, it is treated as an OK private hobby, perhaps like a chess club--something students might be encouraged to pursue on their own.
___"Perhaps a college or university may even encourage voluntary religious organizations on campus," he continued. "But (religion) still is not regarded as something that relates to the more important things of life that we learn about. This is the case, I believe, even at many church-related colleges.
___"This trivialization of religion in education has a deeper implication, ... that in large areas of life Americans are taught to act, despite our religious professions, as though God did not exist. That is at least the message that most Americans are willing to send to the next generation in our educational system."
___Too many educators have presumed secular universities that revere science and personal freedom over religious influence are providing the best education, he said.
___"The time has come for our culture to be rethinking the role of religiously based colleges. Given the morally fragmented, technically oriented, careerist state of our major universities and their undergraduate colleges, why in the world should we think that they should be setting the standard for the best education and that religious colleges should be trying to catch up?
___"Perhaps the time has come when it is the secular universities that should be thought of as second-class and urged to find some way to try to catch up qualitatively to what some of the religious colleges are doing," he noted. "Religious colleges, in the meantime, should not feel that they should have to apologize for their religious character. Rather, they should be building themselves up as models of an alternative higher education that others might want to emulate."
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