General education needs reform, but not its own dismantling
The proposed reframing of the General Education curriculum by CHED should be read not merely as a technical revision of course offerings, but as a deeper statement about what higher education is for. At stake is the philosophy of Philippine higher education itself: is the university primarily an apparatus for workforce preparation, or is it also a space for forming reflective, ethical, critically thinking, and nationally grounded citizens?
On the surface, the proposal appears modern and responsive. It speaks the language of digital literacy, employability, interdisciplinarity, outcomes and flexibility. These are not unimportant concerns. Universities must respond to artificial intelligence, technological change, sustainability, misinformation and the changing world of work.
The problem is not that CHED wants General Education to be relevant. The problem is that relevance appears to have been defined too narrowly, as if the primary task of the university were to produce adaptable workers rather than historically grounded and morally responsible human beings.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the proposal. Modernization does not require the contraction of the humanities. The strongest universities in the Philippines and abroad continue to preserve substantial space for philosophy, ethics, literature, history, the arts, communication and civic inquiry while also integrating new technological competencies. There is no necessary opposition between AI literacy and philosophical reasoning, between employability and historical consciousness, or between digital competence and moral formation.
The best universities do not modernize by abandoning liberal education. They modernize by expanding the intellectual resources through which students can understand the modern world.
The proposed reduction of GE to a much narrower framework risks mistaking efficiency for depth. If General Education is compressed into a small set of competency-driven courses, students may move more quickly into professional programs.
Universities are not factories and students are not products to be finished and dispatched. Intellectual formation takes time. Students need sustained exposure to different ways of knowing: philosophical, historical, scientific, literary, artistic, quantitative, linguistic, ethical and civic. These are not decorative additions to a degree.
They are the conditions that allow students to think beyond their specialization. A graduate who can use technology but cannot ask what technology does to human dignity remains poorly educated. A graduate who can analyze data but cannot interrogate how data is produced and used remains vulnerable to technocratic manipulation.
The displacement of philosophy and the humanities is especially troubling. Ethics, Art Appreciation, Philippine History, literature and related fields are not simply containers of content. They cultivate moral reasoning, judgment, interpretation, historical memory, aesthetic sensitivity and intellectual humility.
Ethics, for instance, is not reducible to digital responsibility or compliance with data governance. It introduces students to enduring questions about justice, freedom, virtue, duty, consequences, dignity and the good life. Absorbing ethics into a broader course on data and knowledge may address contemporary issues, but it risks weakening ethics as a philosophical discipline.
Similarly, the compression of Rizal, Philippine Studies and Philippine History into a reduced curricular space raises serious concerns. Rizal is not simply a nationalist symbol to be invoked for civic values. Philippine History is not merely background knowledge. These fields provide students with the intellectual means to understand colonialism, inequality, state formation, resistance, cultural identity, and democratic struggle.
The Rizal course, mandated by RA 1425, is fundamentally a nationalism course and should not be casually conflated with Philippine History or Philippine Studies. History, as a discipline, has its own methods, evidentiary standards, and epistemological grounding. To marginalize it is to risk producing graduates disconnected from their own historical and cultural contexts.
CHED’s proposal also appears to rest on a questionable assumption: that much of GE has already been covered in senior high school and is therefore redundant at the college level. This assumption is pedagogically weak and socially inequitable.
Senior high school has not functioned as a universal equalizer. Curricular exposure across strands is neither uniform nor equivalent. HUMSS, STEM, ABM, TVL and other pathways do not develop Science, Mathematics, Filipino, textual analysis, historical consciousness and ethical inquiry with the same depth.
For many students, college-level GE courses are not repetitions. They are the first structured opportunity to revisit and deepen these areas in a more mature academic environment. Removing or compressing GE will harm most those from under-resourced schools who rely on the university to mitigate prior inequalities and provide access to cultural and intellectual capital more readily available to graduates of elite institutions.
There is also a constitutional and legal dimension that CHED cannot simply dismiss. The Constitution guarantees academic freedom in institutions of higher learning. That freedom includes meaningful institutional authority over what to teach, how to teach and who may teach.
A rigid, centrally prescribed GE template risks reducing universities to implementers of a national checklist. Regulation becomes control when the state prescribes content, dictates method, standardizes faculty preparation and subjects curricular design to prior approval. These concerns warrant a transparent explanation of the process behind the proposed reframing. What consultations were conducted? What baseline data, tracer studies, or empirical evidence justify a systemic overhaul rather than targeted recalibration?
The proposed framework’s reliance on outcomes-based education and constructive alignment also deserves scrutiny. Outcomes and assessments can be useful. But when everything must be mapped, measured, aligned and audited, the university risks losing the experiences that are most transformative: ambiguity, slow reading, unresolved debate, moral discomfort, intellectual surprise and critical dissent.
Language and critical thinking, in particular, must not be separated. Communication is not merely a professional skill. It is the medium through which thought is formed, power is questioned, meaning is negotiated, and public reason becomes possible.
To be clear, defending GE does not mean defending its weakest forms. Critics are correct that in some institutions, GE has become ceremonial, unevenly taught and sometimes assigned to faculty without adequate disciplinary preparation.
Some courses have been reduced to readings, tests, and compliance rather than genuine intellectual formation. But these implementation failures do not justify dismantling GE. They justify investing in faculty development, disciplinary staffing, peer-led quality assurance and stronger institutional support. The answer to poorly taught Ethics, Rizal, History, Filipino, Communication, or Art Appreciation is not to remove or compress them. The answer is to teach them better.
The employment implications are also real. Humanities and social science teachers have already been made vulnerable by curricular reductions in senior high school. A further contraction of GE in college would intensify displacement, reduce teaching loads and weaken departments that sustain the country’s intellectual infrastructure. This is not merely a guild concern.
If universities lose historians, philosophers, literary scholars, artists, language educators and social theorists, society loses the people trained to cultivate historical memory, ethical debate, cultural interpretation, critical language and public criticism.
A better reform is possible. CHED should not abandon modernization, but neither should it impose a narrow, technocratic curriculum. One alternative is a domain-based GE framework encompassing these broad areas: human thought, culture, language, and the arts; society, governance, citizenship, and ethical life; science, mathematics, technology, and the natural world; and communication, personal formation, wellness, and lifelong learning. Such a model would preserve national coherence while respecting institutional autonomy. It would ensure breadth without forcing all universities into the same cramped mold.
The issue, therefore, is not whether GE should change. It should. The issue is whether reform will deepen education or hollow it out. A country facing profound learning gaps, disinformation, democratic fragility, technological disruption, inequality, ecological crisis and historical amnesia needs more than workforce-ready graduates. It needs citizens capable of judgment, conscience, imagination and critique.
General Education is not a bureaucratic obstacle to specialization. It is the moral and intellectual foundation of higher education. To reduce it to employability, communication skills, data literacy and labor readiness is to confuse training with education. CHED should reform GE, but it must not dismantle the very space where students learn to become more fully human.
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Allen A Espinosa is a professor of science education at the College of Advanced Studies (CAS) and the Educational Policy Research and Development Office (EPRDO) of the Philippine Normal University (PNU). Levi E Elipane ([email protected]) is a professor of mathematics education and Deputy Dean of CAS. Heidi B Macahilig ([email protected]) is a professor of reading education at CAS and the current director of EPRDO. Nikolee Marie A Serafico-Reyes ([email protected]) is an associate professor of social science education at the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences and EPRDO. Arlyne C Marasigan ([email protected]) is a professor of educational leadership and management at CAS and EPRDO. Leah Amor S Cortez ([email protected]) is an associate professor of science education at the Faculty of Science, Technology, and Mathematics. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of PNU.
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