UCSP REVIEWER
Religion and the Search for Ultimate Meaning
Religion – a powerful institution that connects human beings, both as individuals and collectively as groups, to a
transcendent reality.
Types of Religious Organizations
1. Church – a religious organization that claims to possess the truth about salvation exclusively.
2. Sect – perceives itself as a unique owner of the truth. However, it constitutes a minority in a given society.
3. Denomination – is oriented toward cooperation, at least as it relates to other similar denominations.
4. Cults – often considered deviant groups within society.
New Religious Movements – an alternative label for cults that have been negatively portrayed by mass media and
some social scientists.
Syncretism – promotes the growth of popular or folk religion that differs from the original parent religion or
mainstream orthodoxy.
Split-level Christianity is described as the coexistence within the same person of two or more thought-and-behavior
systems that are inconsistent.
Goddess feminism – those who embraced this religion regard the earth as the sacred body of the Goddess.
Peter L. Berger – briefly summarized the thesis of secularism. “Modernization necessarily leads to a decline of
religion,’ both in society and individuals’ minds”.
Secularization Thesis – or the prediction on the steady decline of religion may still be saved by arguing that perhaps
what is threatened today are the traditional, mainstream religions in the West like Christianity; they are declining
because of secular humanism.
Dualism – an attitude wherein fundamentalist groups within an established religion separate themselves from the
mainstream church.
Christian Fundamentalism – a reaction against the triumph of science, to the detriment of spiritual moral values.
Basic Ecclesial Communities (BECs) - became instrumental in raising the consciousness of the poor to fight for their
rights.
Education and Reproduction of Inequality
Education – refers to the formal and informal process of transmitting knowledge, beliefs, and skills from one
generation to the next.
Horace Mann – an American educational reformer, proposed that education could cure social ills. He believed that
education is the great equalizer by giving people the knowledge and technical skills to participate in national
development.
Credentialism – refers to the common practice of relying on earned credentials when hiring staff or assigning social
status rather than on actual skills.
Cultural Capital – is acquired in the family to which one belongs. It is further reinforced in the “academic market”
that hones students to have the right styles and decorum-accent, dispositions, books, qualifications, dictionaries,
artistic preferences, and the like which give them a higher status in society.
Pierre Bourdieu – is famous for his analysis of the reproduction of inequalities in higher education.
The restricted linguistic code – of the lower class is disadvantageous to the lower-class students because schools
emphasize the use of elaborated code.
The elaborated code – predominantly found among middle-class children, provides room for formal and abstract
reasoning. It allows the learners to share a common storyline with others who have different backgrounds.
Education and Economic Development
Knowledge-Economy – is made possible through the massive promotion of educational technologies that support
the utilization of information.
Educational Reforms – can provide new knowledge and retooling of existing skills of the people to expand labor
productivity.
Women and Education
Education is a right. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article states:
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.
Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available
and higher education shall be equally accessible to all based on merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the strengthening of respect for
human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance, and friendship among all
nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
Internationalization – is concerned with the relationships among and between individual countries and presupposes
the nation-state as the essential unit. This drives countries to transform their universities to adapt to the knowledge
economy, and this readiness is measured by scores in international standards.
Managerialism – the application of corporate logic and culture to education.
Robert Nisbet – defines the traditional role of the university as “the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Knowledge and the process of getting to know are in good themselves, and the university, above all institutions, is –
or used to be – devoted to them. To investigate, to find out, to organize and contemplate knowledge, these are what
the university is about”
Multicultural Education – is an inclusive concept used to describe a wide variety of school practices, programs, and
materials designed to help children from diverse groups to experience educational equality.
The Lumad Schools – are examples of how indigenous and local education can help local communities resist the
rampaging effects of globalization not only on their culture but on their long-term survival.
Economy, Society, and Cultural Change
Culture of Poverty – a term used to characterize the damaging effects of poverty on slum dwellers.
Class – refers to the relations among people who share the same class interests about the means of production and
are independent of the access to the ownership of the means of production.
Bourgeoisie or Capitalists – those who own and monopolize the means of production in the classic Marxist analysis
under capitalism.
Proletariat – those who own nothing except to sell their labor power in the market.
Below are the types of class, according to Marx:
1. The bourgeoisie, which the Communist Manifesto referred to as “owners of the means of social production and
employers of wage labor.”
2. The proletariat or the working class, which is said to be “the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means
of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power to live.”
3. There is also the petty bourgeoisie who are the class of educated individuals. The big landowners who exploit the
labor of the peasants.
4. There is likewise the peasant class which includes landless farmers who are forced to offer their services to the big
landowners.
5. Finally, Marx also included the “dangerous class,” otherwise known as the lumpenproletariat, which is said to be
composed of “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” The
lumpenproletariat sells their services to the bourgeoisie, who use them as strikebreakers, labor spies, and fighters
against the workers in times of revolution.
Class – referred to social differences based on economic divisions and inequalities.
Status – designated to the differentiation of groups in the “communal” sphere in terms of their social honor and
social standing.
Caste – a closed system in contrast with the class system that is relatively open. Membership of castes is ascribed
rather than achieved, and social contact between castes is heavily constrained and ritualized.
Social Mobility – people are allowed and can move from one stratum or class to another class.
Social Capital – refers to resources based on group membership, relationships, and networks of influence and
support.
Habitus – refers to the personal psychological dispositions of a person that are shaped by these forms of capital and
family background, while also modifying them in the light of engagement in the social group.
Core or Advance Industrial Countries – do capital-intensive, high-value-adding production.
Peripheral Societies or Less Developed Countries – do labor-intensive, low-value-adding production.
Neoliberalism – is a plural set of ideas rather than a singular body of economic theory.
The Productivist Paradigm – or the belief in endless growth, simply advocated for continuous growth and rejected
any notion of limits to the environment and resources.
