THE Commission on Higher Education (CHED) must have learned its lesson too late. In its rush to reduce the college General Education (GE) subjects to a mere 18, it has tangled with the most articulate — and feisty — faculty members. These are the humanities professors who teach ethics, history, literature and philosophy. Just writing the name of those subjects still sends shivers down my spine, for I had the best — and certainly the most opinionated — teachers in Ateneo who taught us those subjects three times a week. Without gadgets.
They flatly told CHED that its proposed overhaul of the GE curriculum will gut the humanities and leave several teachers at risk of losing their jobs with no government safety net in place.
The criticism came at a CHED public hearing on its draft curriculum that would cut mandatory GE to just 18 units — down from the current 36 — folding philosophy, ethics, literature and history into five broader skills-based courses.
CHED officials explained during the hearing that it is “reframing” the GE program to avoid subjecting students to the same classes they already took up in senior high school. But if you took up “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife” in high school, your college teacher won’t take it up anymore. There is such a thing as age-appropriate texts, and texts appropriate to students’ level of literacy. But then again, what does CHED know about this?
Under the proposal, the 18 units include 15 units of core/mandated GE and three units of institutional GE. The five core GE courses would be Professional Communication, Global Trends and Emerging Technologies, Data Evidence and Ethics in a Knowledge Society, Rizal, and Philippine Studies and Labor Education.
Stand-alone subjects in philosophy, ethics, literature, art appreciation and Philippine history — classes in the current curriculum — do not appear as required subjects. Implementation is being targeted for the academic year 2027-2028.
“Ethics is reduced to a response to fake news and a tool for managing data?” said University of Santo Tomas philosophy professor Paolo Bolaños. “There’s emphasis on market integration after graduation. But there seems to be this lack of understanding of the importance of content in teaching the general education courses.”
Bolaños raised a second concern: CHED had drafted the curriculum without consulting the people who would teach it. The philosophy technical panel, he said, was never invited for talks. The literature technical panel was also not consulted, according to UP professor Jose Wendell Capili.
Jonathan Macayan, co-chairman of the CHED technical panel for general education, said outcomes-based education does not sideline content, and that content experts from the relevant disciplines would be brought in to shape each course before the curriculum is finalized.
UP Los Baños professor Antonio Contreras told the hearing that CHED’s insistence on the word “reframing” did not hold up against what the draft did. Requiring 16 of the 18 mandatory GE units through core courses left universities with only a “token three-unit space for institutional identity.”
“Call it reframing if you want,” Contreras said. “But when institutions can no longer teach arts and social sciences on their own terms, the effect is indistinguishable from removal.” I agree.
Silliman University College of Arts and Sciences dean Alana Leilani Narciso pressed a related point: Neither literature nor philosophy appeared as mandated subjects in the new framework, meaning universities could choose not to offer them at all. She urged CHED to require at least one humanities course for all students rather than leave it to institutional discretion.
Victor Aguilan, convenor of the Council of Teachers and Staff of Colleges and Universities, told the commission that the draft had overlooked a specific legal obligation. The Education Act of 1982 requires CHED to involve the Department of Labor and Employment whenever curriculum changes affect teachers’ employment. This was absent from CHED’s GE overhaul.
In private universities, teaching loads — and by extension job security — are tied directly to the number of units that a subject carries.
CHED technical panel chairman Edizon Fermin said that all existing GE teachers, with the exception of art appreciation instructors, could be absorbed into the new framework with adequate retraining.
Aguilan brushed this off: “Please do not transfer the burden to the higher education institution. That is our experience in K-12.” The draft contained no funding for the retraining.
Aguilan also said that CHED had already come up with a full draft proposal while describing the process as a pilot test. But the results of a pilot, he argued, should be what drives policy, not the other way around.
The public hearing came days after several faculty members and groups expressed their opposition to the draft GE program. CHED faced such withering criticism in social media with the velocity of a storm.
The Arts and Letters Faculty Association of University of Santo Tomas called the draft a threat to the “soul of the university” and warned it would pursue legal action if CHED proceeded without addressing faculty concerns. “Our universities should not merely serve as factories for compliance and productivity,” they said. Suing CHED will stop this harebrained proposal dead on its tracks.
Six Philippine Normal University professors warned that the framework would hurt most the students from under-resourced schools, who rely on college GE classes to deepen learning that uneven senior high school instruction left incomplete.
The proposal confused workforce preparation with education. “A graduate who can use technology but cannot ask what technology does to human dignity remains poorly educated,” professors Allen Espinosa, Levi Elipane, Heidi Macahilig, Nikolee Marie Serafico-Reyes, Arlyne Marasigan and Leah Amor Cortez wrote.
They acknowledged that GE classes in its current form had problems — some courses are ceremonial or unevenly taught, or reduced to readings and compliance of students with course requirements.
But those gaps pointed in one direction only. “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.”
Social media also flamed with the reports. Mark Joseph Calano said that “some representatives from Ateneo de Manila University who participated in the technical panel reportedly did raise serious concerns about the direction of the reform. They repeatedly pushed for the preservation of liberal education and even argued for lifting the 36-unit cap for autonomous institutions. They also reportedly submitted formal positions expressing disagreement with several aspects of the draft GE.”
But they were blithely ignored by the ax-wielding bureaucrats at CHED — and the legislators behind them.
Calano said: “This suggests that some of the strongest voices defending philosophy, humanities and liberal education may not have ultimately shaped the final direction of the framework. It also reveals how easily educational reform can become dominated by bureaucratic and technocratic momentum despite internal opposition from educators themselves.
“What seems clear is that many educators continue defending liberal education, philosophical depth and humanistic formation, yet these concerns are competing against larger pressures involving efficiency, employability, international benchmarking, labor-market responsiveness and technocratic governance. And maybe that is precisely why the public response matters now.
“The public uproar reveals something important: Many people still believe that General Education should remain genuinely general, reflective, philosophical, historical and humane — not merely efficient, measurable and professionally functional.”