Faith and Reason: Reinventing Scholasticism in Postmodern Philippine Catholic Education

Abstract

This paper aims to present the necessity of a new scholastic movement as an intellectual and religious movement and to reinvent it in the context of 21st Century Philippine Catholic Education. This reinvention of Scholasticism aims to design a curriculum for Senior high school students in order to equip them in understanding and defending the Catholic Faith and Teachings. Since the Catholic Church is facing the problems given by postmodernism and atheism, there is a need for another scholastic movement to counter these problems. This paper uses in-depth and comprehensive analysis of texts related to reinvention of scholastic movement in the 21st Century. The researcher used Purposive Sampling technique to carefully select the articles based on their relevance to the reinvention of scholastic movement. This paper uses updated and relevant research papers for analysis. In addition, to argue that there is a need for a new scholastic movement in Philippine Catholic education, the Hegelian dialectic was used, the idea of history repeating itself became the start point of this paper to argue that this is philosophical sound and valid. This paper examines the necessity of the 21st Century Philippine Catholic Education to the reinvented scholastic movement and it also offers a comprehensive curriculum design to reinvent scholasticism in education. Since, it aims to craft a curriculum which is anchored to apologetics and scholasticism, this proposed curriculum can equip the students to be effective Christians who will defend the church and its teachings. With this, the Religious Education for Grade 11 and Grade 12 will be a strong foundation of Catholic Faith in the 21st Century Philippine Education for Catholic schools.