Fado, Saudade, and the Politics of Portuguese Right-Wing Memory: From Estado Novo Suspicion to Salazarist Absorption, Colonial Patriotism, and Post-1974 Nationalist Resurrection

Fado, Saudade, and the Politics of Portuguese Right-Wing Memory:

From Estado Novo Suspicion to Salazarist Absorption, Colonial Patriotism,

and Post-1974 Nationalist Resurrection

At first, this writeup examines the paradoxical relationship between fado, saudade, the Estado Novo establishment, and later Portuguese right-wing political memory. It argues that fado was not originally a natural music of Salazarism. On the contrary, Salazar and early Estado Novo cultural authorities distrusted fado because of its urban, bohemian, marginal, and allegedly defeatist character.

Yet because fado was too popular to ignore, the regime eventually regulated, purified, and absorbed it into a broader cultural system that favored resignation, Catholic moral order, rural folklore, imperial continuity, and the emotional discipline of the people. The article then analyzes how fado and saudade were used to produce a conservative national feeling: sadness without revolt, poverty without class critique, memory without historical rupture, empire without colonial guilt, and homeland without democratic pluralism.

Examples include Amália Rodrigues and the ambiguity of official fado; Uma Casa Portuguesa as domestic-poverty ideology; Fernando Farinha’s Fado Angola as colonial-patriotic fado; José Campos e Sousa’s post-1974 nationalist and monarchist repertoire; and Grândola, Vila Morena as the revolutionary counter-song that reversed the emotional grammar of resignation. The argument is not that fado belongs to the right. Rather, fado’s emotional resources—loss, fate, longing, exile, God, homeland, death, and the sea—made it especially available for right-wing uses when those resources were translated into nostalgia for order, empire, monarchy, and national resurrection.

Introduction: The Irony of Salazarist Fado

The easiest mistake is to say that fado was simply the music of Salazar’s Portugal. The historical reality is more ironic. Fado became associated with the Estado Novo, but Salazar himself was not naturally drawn to it. Maria de São José Côrte-Real cites Christine Garnier’s account that Salazar regarded fado as depressing and believed it weakened Portuguese energy. Côrte-Real summarizes the paradox sharply: fado was “the old song that, having troubled so much the principles of Estado Novo, ended serving it so well.”

This irony is central. Fado was not born as regime music. It was an urban popular form associated with Lisbon’s taverns, streets, bohemian spaces, marginal figures, prostitutes, sailors, coachmen, aristocratic adventurers, and working-class neighborhoods. The Museu do Fado describes its nineteenth-century emergence in popular Lisbon contexts and notes its early links to marginality and transgression. UNESCO likewise identifies fado as an urban Portuguese performance genre, especially practiced in Lisbon, and as a multicultural synthesis of Afro-Brazilian, rural, local, and urban song patterns.

The Estado Novo therefore faced a cultural problem. It preferred disciplined rural folklore, Catholic morality, social hierarchy, patriotic education, and the image of a humble, obedient people. Fado, by contrast, was urban, fatalistic, sensual, improvisatory, and socially ambiguous. But it was also immensely popular. The regime could not simply erase it. So it did what authoritarian cultural systems often do: it regulated, purified, professionalized, and reinterpreted a troublesome popular form until it could be made to serve the national image.

This writeup argues that the Estado Novo’s relation to fado passed through three stages: suspicion, domestication, and symbolic appropriation. Later, after the Carnation Revolution, sectors of the Portuguese right inherited this emotional grammar and used it differently. Under Salazarism, fado and saudade helped discipline sadness into endurance. After 1974, right-wing nationalist song used saudade as grievance: Portugal was no longer merely suffering; it was imagined as betrayed, mutilated, secularized, decolonized, and in need of resurrection.

Fado Was Urban Before It Was National

The regime’s later use of fado obscures its urban origin. Fado was not originally the clean voice of a Catholic peasant nation. It belonged to the popular life of Lisbon. The Museu do Fado places its early development in gardens, bullfights, streets, alleys, taverns, cafés, and other urban leisure spaces; it also notes the social presence of prostitutes, sailors, coachmen, and other marginal or semi-marginal figures in early fado culture.

That origin matters politically. An authoritarian regime that idealized the rural village could not immediately embrace a song associated with Lisbon’s lower quarters and bohemian life. The Estado Novo’s national mythology preferred peasants in costume, Catholic mothers, soldiers, fishermen, saints, and obedient families. The urban fadista was harder to place inside that moral picture.

Yet fado already had qualities that could be appropriated. It sang longing, fate, poverty, absence, exile, love, death, and the sea. These themes could be interpreted as private suffering rather than political critique. They could also be made to sound like the Portuguese soul itself. Fado’s emotional power therefore made it dangerous and useful at the same time.

Saudade as Political Emotion

Saudade is often treated as a poetic emotion: longing for what is absent, loved, lost, or unreachable. But saudade can also become political. It can attach itself to a dead lover, a lost city, a motherland, a vanished empire, a dead king, a defeated army, or an imagined moral order. That is why it was so useful to conservative and right-wing memory.

In fado, saudade often turns suffering into beauty. Loss becomes dignity. Poverty becomes soul. Waiting becomes fidelity. The problem is that this emotional structure can depoliticize material suffering. A poor household is not necessarily presented as the result of inequality; it becomes a humble Portuguese home. A soldier’s absence is not necessarily presented as the result of colonial war; it becomes sacrifice. A lost empire is not necessarily presented as colonial domination; it becomes wounded national continuity.

This is how saudade can become conservative. It does not need to shout slogans. It works through affect. It teaches that the proper response to loss is remembrance, endurance, and fidelity. In a democratic or radical context, saudade can be reflective and critical. In a right-wing context, it can become nostalgia for hierarchy, empire, monarchy, Catholic order, or the supposedly organic nation.

The Estado Novo’s Cultural Machine: Política do Espírito

The Estado Novo did not treat culture as incidental. It treated culture as a field of political formation. Côrte-Real explains that António Ferro’s Política do Espírito was officially implemented with the Estado Novo in 1933 and that the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional was tasked with integrating the Portuguese people into the moral thought that should guide the nation. RTP Ensina similarly describes the SPN as a vehicle for disseminating the regime’s ideology through Ferro’s Política do Espírito, combining modernist language with official conservatism, ruralism, mythic history, and obedience to the paternal figure of the dictator.

This cultural machine had a double character. It was modern in method but anti-modern in message. It used radio, cinema, exhibitions, publishing, contests, folklore, tourism, theatre, and spectacle to promote an image of Portugal as old, rural, Catholic, imperial, and socially harmonious. The regime did not simply preserve tradition. It staged tradition.

This is why fado’s eventual absorption was not accidental. Once regulated and purified, fado could become one more instrument in the formation of the national soul. Its melancholy could be made to serve the “intentional calm” of the nation. Its grief could be safely placed inside an image of Portuguese destiny rather than political conflict.

Salazar’s Dislike of Fado and the Regime’s Later Use of It

The clearest irony appears in Côrte-Real’s discussion of Salazar’s attitude. She cites a scene in which fado is heard as a song of sadness, distance, and longing. Salazar is represented as translating the song softly, yet the account stresses that he did not like such songs because they were depressing and because he believed they emptied the soul of energy and encouraged inaction.

This is a crucial correction to the simplistic view that Salazarism naturally loved fado. The regime’s early cultural authorities worried that fado was a “song of the defeated.” Luiz Moita’s 1936 O Fado: Canção de Vencidos attacked fado as weakening and stupefying. Côrte-Real notes that Estado Novo cultural policy in the 1930s tried to minimize fado’s importance and that Moita’s radio talks on the Emissora Nacional were among the most revealing anti-fado initiatives.

The regime’s anti-fado campaign failed. Côrte-Real’s conclusion is decisive: after efforts to fight fado proved unfruitful, the Estado Novo developed policies to shape fado, use it for its own purposes, and adjust it to its ideals and interests. RTP’s report on Michael Colvin’s work makes a similar point: the regime did not originally use fado as a straightforward propaganda instrument, but fado’s popularity forced the government to accept it as part of the official national repertoire.

Thus the historical formula is not “Salazar loved fado.” It is more accurate to say: Salazarist culture distrusted fado, failed to suppress its popularity, and then domesticated it.

Regulation, Professionalization, and Purification

Fado’s domestication occurred through regulation and professionalization. The Museu do Fado notes that the regulation of show activities in 1927 subjected public entertainment to official supervision, and that fado underwent unavoidable changes in that context. It also describes the growth of professional fado companies in the 1930s, radio dissemination, theatrical circuits, and later cinema.

This process did not merely organize performances. It changed the meaning of fado. A genre rooted in informal urban spaces became more respectable, staged, recorded, licensed, and exportable. What had once been a tavern and street culture could now be presented in theatres, films, radio broadcasts, official cultural circuits, and eventually international tours.

Purification did not mean fado lost all ambiguity. It still carried sadness, sensuality, and social memory. But its public image could be disciplined. Its marginality could be softened. Its urban rawness could be recoded as national melancholy. Its dangerous associations could be displaced by the image of the fadista as interpreter of the Portuguese soul.

Ruralism, Folklore, and the Peasant Aesthetic

Fado’s absorption should be placed within the Estado Novo’s broader preference for folklore and ruralism. Vera Marques Alves’s work on popular art and nation under the Estado Novo shows that the SPN/SNI developed a wide set of folklorist initiatives in the 1930s and 1940s and that official folklore strongly aestheticized and beautified rural materials.

The Estado Novo’s peasant was not primarily a historical actor. He or she was a national symbol: humble, devout, colorful, poor but dignified, rooted in land and custom. The regime liked the peasant as image, dance, costume, song, and moral lesson. It did not like the peasant as a political subject with grievances.

This helps explain why Estado Novo music often sounds “peasantish.” It is not simply because the songs came from peasants. Often they came from a state-managed or media-managed rural aesthetic. The village became a theatre of national identity. Folklore became proof that Portugal was organic, old, harmonious, and socially stable.

Côrte-Real quotes António Ferro’s view that folklore was “the raw material of sovereignty itself,” because it allowed peoples to appreciate their own personality and independence. That formulation is revealing. Folklore was not merely art; it was sovereignty staged as song, dance, and costume.

Anti-Urbanism and the Fear of Modernity The Estado Novo’s ruralism also carried an anti-urban impulse. Daniel Melo describes daily life under Salazarism through controlled and repressed leisure, propaganda, corporatism, and education, and his discussion emphasizes the role of ruralist rhetoric and anti-city ideology in the regime’s social imagination.

The city was dangerous because it produced unstable social forms: cafés, newspapers, unions, universities, political associations, cinema, jazz, modernist art, workers’ movements, student protest, and sexual freedom. The village, by contrast, could be imagined as stable: father, mother, priest, land, soldier, saint, and nation.

Fado complicated this dichotomy because it was urban. The regime could not make fado rural, but it could make it nostalgic. Lisbon could be sung not as a modern city of conflict but as old Lisbon: alleys, lamps, mourning, taverns, saints, and memories. Coimbra could be sung as romantic student memory rather than as a site of politicized youth. The city was acceptable when converted into heritage.

Thus, Estado Novo musical culture often made the urban sound old and the rural sound eternal.

The Sad-Glad Sound: Suffering Without Revolt

The emotional paradox of Estado Novo-compatible music can be summarized simply: sadness was allowed when it became resignation, and joy was allowed when it became order. A song could lament absence, poverty, death, exile, or war. But it could not easily accuse the social order. A song could celebrate the village, the home, the soldier, or the nation. But it could not celebrate emancipation from hierarchy.

This produced the sound that seems “sad” and “frustratingly glad.” The music could be cheerful in rhythm or orchestration, but its world was full of waiting, poverty, sacrifice, and longing. Conversely, it could be mournful but not rebellious. It was a music of emotional containment.

The regime’s preferred affective code was not revolutionary passion but disciplined sentiment. The Portuguese were to feel deeply, but not politically. They were to remember, not revolt. They were to endure, not organize. They were to mourn the absent beloved, not indict the state.

Uma Casa Portuguesa: Poverty as Moral Beauty

One emblematic song is Uma Casa Portuguesa, associated above all with Amália Rodrigues. SecondHandSongs credits the music to Artur Vaz da Fonseca and the lyrics to Reinaldo Ferreira and Vasco Matos Sequeira, with Amália’s 1952 version listed as the first release in its database.

The song imagines the Portuguese home as poor, hospitable, sincere, and morally rich. Its domestic world is made from bread, wine, hospitality, whitewashed simplicity, and humble welcome. Politically, the song is not a manifesto. But it is ideologically powerful because it turns poverty into virtue.

This is why the song fits the Estado Novo emotional universe. It does not say that poverty is unjust. It says that poverty can be joyful, dignified, and Portuguese. The poor household becomes the moral center of the nation. Material deprivation is softened by hospitality and faith.

The right-wing use of such songs lies not necessarily in explicit propaganda but in social pedagogy. The listener learns that Portugal’s greatness is not industrial abundance, democratic conflict, or class mobility, but humble domestic sincerity. The song makes poverty beautiful enough to be endured.

Amália Rodrigues: Between Regime Association and Poetic Ambiguity

Amália Rodrigues occupies a difficult place in this history. She became the international face of fado during the Estado Novo, and that visibility later made her vulnerable to accusations of complicity. Yet she also interpreted poets associated with opposition or censorship, including Alexandre O’Neill, Manuel Alegre, David Mourão-Ferreira, and Ary dos Santos, as Martinho notes in his study of fado and canto de intervenção during the Carnation Revolution.

This ambiguity matters. Amália was neither reducible to regime propaganda nor separable from the national image the regime benefited from. She made fado prestigious, literary, and internationally legible. That prestige helped Portugal export a melancholy cultural identity. But her repertoire also exceeded the regime’s comfort zone.

Abandono, also known as Fado Peniche, is a good example. Diário de Notícias notes that the song had clear political content and was associated with Álvaro Cunhal’s escape from the Peniche prison.

Gaivota, with lyrics by Alexandre O’Neill and music by Alain Oulman, was also part of Amália’s modernized poetic fado repertoire. RTP Arquivos identifies it as a fado interpreted by Amália with O’Neill’s text and Oulman’s music.

Amália therefore reveals a broader truth: fado could be domesticated, but not fully controlled. Its sadness could serve resignation, but it could also conceal dissent.

Fernando Farinha and the Colonial Use of Fado

Fernando Farinha provides a more explicitly political case. The Museu do Fado identifies Fernando Tavares Farinha as a Barreiro-born fadista who moved as a child to Lisbon’s Bica district and became known as the Miúdo da Bica. Farinha belonged to the urban popular world of fado, but one of his most politically revealing recordings is Fado Angola.

Deezer’s metadata for the album Fado Angola lists the title track as written by José Pereira and composed by Fernando Farinha, with a 1973 release date. The song is a striking example of colonial-patriotic fado. Its short, central claim can be quoted as: “Serás Sempre Portugal.”

That fragment carries the whole ideological structure. Angola is not presented as a colonized territory seeking independence. It is sung as Portugal itself. Colonial war becomes defense of the homeland. Decolonization becomes amputation. Anti-colonial struggle becomes foreign aggression or betrayal.

This is saudade as imperial possession. The listener is invited to feel Angola not politically, but intimately: as wounded kin, lost body, endangered home. The colonial relationship is converted into family feeling. Farinha's "Fado Angola" and "Mozambique" works because it turns empire into affect. The song’s emotional logic is not analytical. It does not debate colonialism. It assumes a pluricontinental Portugal and then asks the listener to grieve threats to that unity.

This was fully compatible with Estado Novo imperial ideology. The regime insisted that Angola and other African territories were not colonies in the ordinary sense but overseas provinces of Portugal. A constitutional claim of that kind could sound dry. Fado made it emotional. It allowed the empire to be sung as memory, loyalty, and destiny- even it meant criticism by the world, or even by the Portuguese themselves and its subjects demanding independence.

Farinha’s case also shows why fado could be useful to the right even when it had urban roots. The sadness of fado could be redirected toward colonial loss. Its dignity could sanctify imperial endurance. Its fatalism could make war sound like sacrifice. Its intimacy could transform those songs from a political territory into a beloved part of the national body as the regime expressed.

Post-1974: Fado Under Suspicion

After the Carnation Revolution, fado’s association with the Estado Novo became politically burdensome. The Museu do Fado notes that in the years immediately after the revolution, the Grande Noite do Fado contest was interrupted for two years and fado’s presence on radio and television decreased radically, testifying to hostility toward the genre.

Martinho’s study explains why. From the late 1960s and especially around the revolution, fado and Amália Rodrigues were identified by many with the political, economic, and cultural backwardness of the Estado Novo; fado was seen as inviting resignation and conformism, while canto de intervenção became associated with youth, opposition, and revolutionary renewal.

This was not a neutral musical debate. It was a struggle over national affect. Was Portuguese song supposed to mourn fate or change history? Was the people’s voice a fado voice or a revolutionary voice? Was saudade a national virtue or a political trap?

"Grândola, Vila Morena": The Counter-Song

José Afonso’s "Grândola, Vila Morena" reversed the emotional grammar of official sadness. The song became a signal for the military movement that overthrew the Estado Novo in April 1974, along with Paulo de Carvalho’s "E Depois do Adeus". The Guardian’s retrospective account notes the role of both songs in the coup signaling system. The crucial lyric fragment is: “O povo é quem mais ordena.” This is the opposite of Salazarist emotional discipline. The people are not picturesque. They are not merely humble. They are not only the object of folklore. They command.

The song’s power lies in its use of folk-like collective sound against the authoritarian monopoly of tradition. It does not reject the people’s musical idiom. It reclaims it. The rural and collective voice becomes democratic rather than obedient. The people are no longer staged by the state; they speak as sovereign.

The Right After 1974: Saudade as Defeat and Resurrection

The fall of the Estado Novo changed the function of right-wing saudade. Under the dictatorship, conservative musical culture helped stabilize order. After the revolution, right-wing song became a language of defeat, grievance, and restoration.

For sectors of the right, 1974 meant not only democracy but also loss: loss of empire, loss of hierarchy, loss of anti-communist certainty, loss of Catholic public authority, loss of the old military and colonial nation. Saudade therefore became politically sharper. It no longer simply mourned absence; it accused the present of having stolen the past.

This is the context for José Campos e Sousa and the post-revolutionary nationalist repertoire. His work shows how the emotional vocabulary of fado, poetry, Catholicism, monarchy, and national memory could be recombined after 1974 into right-wing song.

José Campos e Sousa and the Right-Wing Songbook

José Campos e Sousa was born in Lisbon in 1947 and is identified in available biographical summaries as a Portuguese composer and performer whose musical formation included the Beatles, Brassens, Brel, Ferré, Aznavour, and bossa nova. His later work includes settings of Camões, Pessoa, António Sardinha, Miguel Torga, David Mourão-Ferreira, Vasco Graça Moura, Rodrigo Emílio, Diogo Pacheco de Amorim, and others.

His catalog is revealing. It includes Quando o Fado é Oração, described as a fado mass; Conjurados; Portugal Sempre; Mensagem – À Beira-Mágoa; and nationalist or monarchist hymns such as Ressurreição and Deus, Pátria, Rei.

The conceptual field is clear: fado, prayer, monarchy, Pessoa, restoration, Catholic memory, and Portugal as sacred continuity. This is not ordinary nostalgia. It is the musical construction of a metaphysical nation.

Ressurreição: Nationalist Rebirth After Defeat

Ressurreição is central to the post-1974 right-wing use of song. Marchi and Zúquete note that José Campos e Sousa edited the Cancioneiro da Resistência in Madrid and that Ressurreição, a poem by Diogo Pacheco de Amorim, acquired special status among radical-right activists after the revolution. They describe it as revealing expectations of a vast anti-communist popular uprising leading to the renaissance of the nation.

Polígrafo likewise reports that Ressurreição was written by Diogo Pacheco de Amorim and José Campos e Sousa during the hot summer of 1975 and was adopted by the youth organization Movimento Nacionalista as a hymn.

The song’s imagery is resurrectionist, anti-communist, and mythic. It imagines a sacred Portugal awakening from death, red flags burning, and Lusitania flowering again. This is not Salazarist calm. It is post-revolutionary counter-mobilization.

The difference is important. Estado Novo musical culture often said: Portugal endures. Ressurreição says: Portugal must rise again.

Deus, Pátria, Rei: Monarchist Saudade

Campos e Sousa’s "Deus, Pátria, Rei" belongs to a related but distinct tradition: monarchist saudade. The title itself gathers three sacred signs: God, Fatherland, King. Biographical and discographic summaries list it among Campos e Sousa’s hymns and identify his continuing interest in monarchy, Portugal, Lisbon, love, and Pessoa.

Here the lost object is not only empire or the pre-1974 order. It is the crown. The monarchist song transforms constitutional preference into longing. The king becomes not simply a political office but the missing symbol of national wholeness.

This is saudade as restoration. The nation is imagined as incomplete because its sacred hierarchy is absent. The emotional movement resembles fado: a beloved object is lost; the singer remains faithful; memory becomes duty. But the object of longing is no longer a lover or city. It is a political-theological order.

"Quando o Fado é Oração": Fado as Prayer

The title "Quando o Fado é Oração" is especially revealing. A fado mass makes explicit what was often implicit in conservative uses of fado: Portuguese sorrow can be sacralized. Fado becomes prayer. The fadista becomes a kind of penitent or supplicant. The nation becomes a spiritual body.

This matters because sacralized sadness can be politically powerful. If national grief is prayer, then the nation’s history becomes sacred. If history is sacred, then revolution can be framed as sacrilege. If Portugal’s suffering is holy, then the political right can present itself not merely as a party position but as guardian of a wounded inheritance.

This is one reason fado and saudade were so attractive to the right. They allowed politics to sound older than politics.

The right-wing use of fado and saudade often works by making ideology appear as memory. Instead of saying “restore hierarchy,” a song can mourn the broken nation. Instead of saying “defend empire,” a song can sing Angola as Portugal. Instead of saying “oppose communism,” a song can imagine red flags as signs of desecration. Instead of saying “restore monarchy,” a song can invoke God, Fatherland, and King.

This strategy gives political claims an aura of ancestral truth. The song does not argue like a manifesto. It remembers like a wound.

That is why fado’s emotional vocabulary is so useful. It already contains absence, fate, sorrow, loyalty, exile, and longing. Right-wing memory adds a political object to that emotional form: empire, crown, homeland, Catholic order, anti-communist nation.

The Old-New Opposition After the Revolution

The Carnation Revolution produced a symbolic opposition between old and new music. Old music meant fado, Amália, resignation, nostalgia, poverty, and the Estado Novo. New music meant canto de intervenção, youth, protest, democracy, anti-colonialism, and revolutionary hope. Martinho’s study of Portuguese music during the revolution places this old-new divide at the center of the debate.

But the opposition was never absolute. Fado did not disappear. The Museu do Fado notes that after the most intense post-revolutionary hostility, fado regained space, especially as democratic stabilization proceeded after 1976, and by the 1980s it again occupied a central place in Portuguese musical heritage.

This recovery shows that fado was larger than Salazarism. Yet the right could also use that recovery to argue that the revolution had unfairly attacked “true” Portuguese culture. Thus fado’s rehabilitation could be democratic, aesthetic, commercial, or conservative depending on who used it and how.

Furthermore, the loss of the African empire intensified right-wing saudade. For many retornados and conservative nationalists, decolonization was experienced as rupture, humiliation, and abandonment. Music could convert that historical trauma into a moral narrative: Portugal had been betrayed; the empire had been surrendered; the old soldiers and settlers had been forgotten.

In this context, a song like "Fado Angola" or "Mozambique" did not end in 1974. Its emotional structure survived as memory. Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, and the wider Ultramar could be remembered not as colonies but as lost Portuguese worlds. The imperial past became a site of grief.

This is one reason the right’s relation to fado is not simply about dictatorship. It is also about post-imperial mourning. Saudade gave that mourning a national language.

The Peasant, the Soldier, and the Mother

The Estado Novo’s musical imagination repeatedly returned to three figures: the peasant, the soldier, and the mother. The peasant embodied rootedness. The soldier embodied sacrifice. The mother embodied waiting, faith, and continuity.

These figures were politically safe because they naturalized hierarchy. The peasant works. The soldier obeys. The mother waits. Each suffers, but suffering is dignified rather than politicized.

Fado and fado-like songs could intensify these figures emotionally. The mother’s waiting becomes saudade. The soldier’s absence becomes national sacrifice. The peasant’s poverty becomes moral simplicity. The colonial soldier’s distance becomes proof of loyalty.

The danger is that real historical suffering disappears behind symbolic beauty. Poverty is sung, not solved. War is mourned, not questioned. Empire is loved, not analyzed. Hierarchy is remembered, not debated.

Why the Estado Novo Preferred Rural Folklore and Tradition
but Needed Fado?

The Estado Novo’s first preference was rural folklore because folklore could be more easily purified. Dances, costumes, regional songs, and village festivals could be staged as harmonious and apolitical. Fado was harder: it was urban, sad, and morally ambiguous.

But fado had one advantage folklore lacked: emotional depth. Folklore could show the happy people; fado could show the suffering soul. The regime needed both. Folklore gave Portugal a body; fado gave it a wound.

This is why the relationship between fado and the Estado Novo became so durable. Even though Salazar distrusted fado, the regime eventually needed its emotional prestige. A nation cannot live only on dances and costumes. It also needs a tragic self-image. Fado supplied that tragedy. Furthermore, the use of fado by the Right- especially during Salazar rests on a particular theory of the people. The people are not imagined primarily as democratic agents. They are imagined as bearers of memory. They carry songs, prayers, customs, landscapes, dead heroes, and inherited sorrows. This view can honor popular culture, but it can also freeze the people into symbols. The people become authentic when they remember, obey, sing, and suffer. They become dangerous when they organize, strike, vote against hierarchy, question empire, or demand social transformation.

But songs like Grândola Vila Morena was revolutionary because it broke this symbolic prison using the sound synonymous with the people. It used popular song to say the people command. That is why it threatened the entire emotional architecture of Salazarist culture.

Another factor, such as Catholicism intensified the conservative use of fado because it supplied a language of sacrifice, prayer, sin, death, and redemption. Even secular fado often sounds penitential. Its posture—standing, singing, restrained gesture, silence, intensity—can resemble ritual. The Estado Novo’s Catholic moral order could therefore read fado as spiritualized suffering, provided fado was purified of tavern immorality and political danger. Later right-wing musicians could go further by making fado explicitly devotional, as in the concept of a fado mass.

However, this does not mean fado is inherently Catholic. It means its affective form can be Catholicized. Its sadness can be made sacramental. Its longing can be made prayerful. Its memory can be made sacred.

Of Fado, Order Monarchy, and Sebastianism: 

The Right’s Use of Poetry and Song in elevating politics

Portuguese right-wing saudade often intersects with monarchist and Sebastianist feeling: the idea that the lost king or lost order will return. In such a worldview, Portugal is not merely a republic with political disagreements. It is a nation awaiting restoration.

Campos e Sousa’s monarchist work "Deus, Patria, Rei" fits this pattern. The missing king becomes an object of longing. The crown becomes a wound. The nation becomes a body awaiting its proper head. The song is itself a "call for identity and tradition" in the form of the monarchy, that whereas "Democracy" and "Freedom" meant Chaos, the idea of restoring the Monarchy meant restoring the order in itself.

This is why monarchist song can sound like fado even when it is not formally fado. Its emotional form is fado-like: absence, fidelity, memory, and hoped-for return.

Furthermore, Campos e Sousa’s repertoire also shows the importance of poetry to Portuguese right-wing music. By setting poets such as Camões, Pessoa, António Sardinha, Rodrigo Emílio, and Diogo Pacheco de Amorim, he places political song inside a literary-national tradition.

This strategy matters. Poetry elevates politics. It makes nationalism sound cultured, not merely partisan. It places contemporary right-wing feeling inside a long national canon. Pessoa’s Mensagem, Camões’s epic memory, and restorationist symbols all become resources for post-1974 identity.

Thus, the right’s musical use of fado and saudade is also a literary project. It seeks to make political longing sound like national poetry.

Conclusion: A Music of Defeat, Discipline, and Return

The relationship between fado, saudade, the Estado Novo, and the Portuguese right is not simple. Fado was not born right-wing. Salazar himself distrusted it. Early Estado Novo cultural policy tried to minimize it because it seemed depressing, urban, and defeatist. Yet fado’s popularity and emotional force made it impossible to ignore. The regime therefore regulated, purified, and absorbed it.

Once absorbed, fado became useful because it could transform suffering into national destiny. It made poverty dignified, loss beautiful, exile poetic, and empire intimate. Alongside rural folklore, it helped the Estado Novo imagine Portugal as humble, obedient, Catholic, old, wounded, and enduring.

After 1974, the same emotional grammar was fought over. Revolutionary song used folk and collective music to declare popular sovereignty. Fado was temporarily suspected as the sound of the old order. But the right reworked saudade into a politics of loss and resurrection. Fernando Farinha’s Fado Angola stands as colonial-patriotic fado. José Campos e Sousa’s nationalist and monarchist repertoire shows post-revolutionary saudade becoming anti-communist, restorationist, Catholic, and poetic.

The deepest irony remains this: Salazar disliked fado because he thought it weakened Portuguese energy. Yet the regime he led eventually benefited from fado’s very weakness—its melancholy, fatalism, longing, and resignation. The song of the defeated became a tool of a state that wanted its people to endure defeat without rebellion. After the revolution, the right turned that same song-world into a call for resurrection.

***

References

Alves, V. M. (2007). “A poesia dos simples”: Arte popular e nação no Estado Novo. Etnográfica.

Côrte-Real, M. S. J. (2002). Musical priorities in the cultural policy of Estado Novo. Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia.

Deezer. (n.d.). Fado Angola by Fernando Farinha: Album metadata.

Diário de Notícias. (2024). “Abandono” / “Fado Peniche” and its political content.

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When College is treated as a Job Ticket: Attempts to Reduce General Education, Crass Anti-Intellectualism, and the False Economy of Mere Upskilling

When College is treated as a Job Ticket:
Attempts to Reduce General Education,

Crass Anti-Intellectualism,

and the False Economy of Mere Upskilling

The controversy over the Commission on Higher Education’s proposed reframing of General Education in Philippine colleges is not merely an argument about curriculum units. It is not simply a bureaucratic quarrel over whether a student should take 36 units, 21 units, or 18 units of General Education. Beneath the administrative language of “decongestion,” “alignment,” “skills,” “redundancy,” and “employability” lies a more important question: what is college for?

Is higher education supposed to form educated persons, or merely employable workers?

Is the university a place where young adults learn to think about society, history, ethics, language, culture, work, citizenship, and the self? Or is it now merely an expensive gateway to employment, where every subject must justify itself by immediate usefulness to a job description?

This is the deeper issue exposed by the current debate. CHED’s proposed Reframed General Education curriculum reportedly involved reducing the current 36-unit GE requirement to 18 or 21 units, while integrating or merging areas such as ethics, philosophy, arts, literature, Philippine history, and other humanities and social-science subjects into broader courses. After opposition from faculty groups, universities, and professional organizations, CHED announced that the rollout would be pushed to 2028 rather than implemented immediately 

On Memo with Korina, Michael Pante, convenor of the General Education Movement, warned that reducing General Education would weaken students’ grounding in critical thinking, Philippine history, self-understanding, creativity, and civic formation. The public framing of the controversy was sharp: “Soft skills out, robot is in.” That phrase may sound polemical, but it captures a real fear: that college may be reduced to technical training stripped of historical, ethical, cultural, and human depth.

The reactions from some members of the public were equally revealing. One commenter argued, translated into English, that “what should be offered at the tertiary level are courses that prepare students for the real world; in engineering, engineering skills; General Education courses should be offered in junior and senior high school.” Another said, “In high school, the emphasis should be on basic education that young people need to know. Once in college, one should concentrate only on passion and career path. Why study subjects not related to your career line?” A third insisted that graduates “cannot be robots” because those courses were already taken in junior and senior high school, making college GE “redundant and expensive.” Another comment reduced the matter to family cost: students are paying for “skills needed in their chosen career,” while repetitive curriculum is “a waste of time and money.” The bluntest version said that social studies and the humanities are “not so relevant,” and that engineering students should study only engineering subjects to make schooling easier and cheaper for parents.

These comments are not sophisticated, but they are important. They reveal the popular philosophy behind the redundancy argument. To many people, college is not about becoming educated. It is about getting a job. Everything else is treated as delay, burden, repetition, cost, or luxury.

That is the problem. The idea of calling General Education redundant is driven by the thought that college is essentially an employment mechanism. Under this view, history, ethics, literature, philosophy, political thought, sociology, economics, art, communication, and the study of the self are not parts of human formation. They are obstacles between the student and the labor market.

But college is not only about preparing a student to work. It is also about helping a young adult understand the self, society, country, world, and moral life—not as a child in basic education, not merely as a pupil, not even merely as a student fulfilling requirements, but as a person entering adulthood. And to remove that dimension from higher education is not reform. It is reduction.

The Hidden Assumption: College as Employment Purchase

The strongest argument of the anti-GE commenters is also their weakest: college is expensive, therefore college should teach only what leads directly to a career. This argument is emotionally powerful because it is grounded in real hardship. In the Philippines, many families treat college as a major financial gamble. Tuition, transportation, meals, books, uniforms, gadgets, lodging, internet access, and miscellaneous fees all become part of the family burden. For poorer households, one additional semester can mean debt, sacrifice, or the postponement of another sibling’s schooling.

Therefore, it is not surprising that many parents and students become impatient with subjects that do not appear directly connected to employment. In a hand-to-mouth society, the question “Will this help me get a job?” becomes the dominant measure of educational value.

But that question is not enough. The fact that families are economically pressured does not mean the meaning of education should be reduced to economic pressure. Poverty explains why many people want faster, cheaper, more job-centered schooling. It does not prove that such schooling is educationally sufficient.

A society that forces people to think only in terms of survival also damages their ability to imagine education beyond survival. This is where economic hardship meets anti-intellectualism. Some people do not merely say, “We cannot afford too many units.” They go further and say, “Humanities are irrelevant,” “social studies are useless,” “history was already taught,” “ethics is common sense,” “communication is basic,” and “only major subjects matter.”

That is no longer just a complaint about cost. That is a cultural statement. It is a statement that thinking deeply is unnecessary unless it has immediate market value. It is a statement that education must justify itself to employment, but employment need not justify itself to society. It is a statement that a student is primarily a future worker, not a future citizen, parent, voter, professional, neighbor, leader, or human being.

This is the logic of educational minimalism. Educational minimalism does not ask what kind of person a university should form. It asks only how quickly the student can be made employable. It mistakes speed for efficiency and efficiency for wisdom.

This is why the “redundancy” argument deserves scrutiny. The claim sounds reasonable: why teach in college what has already been taught in junior and senior high school? But the argument assumes that education is simply a transfer of information. If the student has already “taken” the subject, then the subject is considered complete.

That is a shallow understanding of learning. A child studies history differently from a young adult. A teenager studies ethics differently from someone about to enter a profession. A senior high school student studies society differently from a college student who will soon vote, work, pay taxes, enter institutions, raise a family, or participate in public life. A college student does not simply repeat high school lessons. He returns to old subjects with greater maturity, greater social exposure, and greater capacity for abstraction.

To call this repetition is like saying that a person who read a children’s Bible no longer needs theology, or someone who learned arithmetic no longer needs statistics, or someone who wrote essays in high school no longer needs research writing, policy analysis, legal reasoning, or professional communication.

Education deepens by return. The same subject can be childish at one level, adolescent at another, and adult at a higher level. Philippine history in grade school is not the same as Philippine history in college. Ethics in senior high school is not the same as professional ethics in engineering, medicine, law, business, public administration, or technology. Communication in basic education is not the same as argumentation, technical writing, public persuasion, or civic discourse.

The charge of redundancy is often not an educational analysis. It is a cost reaction disguised as curriculum theory.

CHED’s Own Earlier Philosophy of General Education

The irony is that General Education is not some accidental collection of filler subjects. CHED Memorandum Order No. 20, series of 2013, described General Education as the part of the curriculum common to all undergraduate students regardless of major. It was meant to expose students to different domains of knowledge and different ways of understanding social and natural realities. It was also designed to develop intellectual competencies, including critical, analytical, and creative thinking, as well as civic capacities demanded by membership in the community, country, and world.

That philosophy matters. General Education was not designed merely to add units. It was meant to cultivate the broad intellectual and civic capacities that specialization alone cannot provide.

Specialization asks: what does the student need to know to become an engineer, accountant, nurse, teacher, architect, programmer, or manager?

General Education asks: what does the student need to know to become an educated person in society?

The two questions are not enemies. They are complementary. The Philippine Higher Education Act of 1994, Republic Act No. 7722, likewise frames higher education in broader terms than mere manpower production. The law states that higher education should promote academic freedom, continuing intellectual growth, the advancement of learning and research, responsible and effective leadership, the education of professionals, and the enrichment of historical and cultural heritage.

In other words, the legal and institutional philosophy of Philippine higher education is not reducible to employment. Employment is important, but it is not the whole. A college that produces workers without forming judgment fails part of its public duty.

This is especially important in a developing country. The Philippines does not merely need more graduates. It needs better citizens, better professionals, better institutions, and better public reasoning. It needs engineers who understand public safety, architects who understand communities, accountants who understand corruption risk, nurses who understand dignity, teachers who understand historical consciousness, programmers who understand privacy and social harm, and business leaders who understand labor and national development.

A university that abandons General Education does not become modern. It becomes narrow.

When “Soft Skills” Are Not Soft

One of the most misleading terms in modern education and business is “soft skills.” The phrase makes communication, critical thinking, ethical judgment, teamwork, creativity, leadership, cultural literacy, and self-awareness sound secondary to “hard” technical skills.

But in actual professional life, these so-called soft skills are often the hardest to acquire. A student can be trained to operate software in months. It takes longer to develop judgment. A worker can memorize procedures quickly. It takes longer to learn how to communicate under pressure, interpret social context, negotiate conflict, question assumptions, and understand consequences.

Even global business research no longer supports the idea that technical ability alone is sufficient. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identified analytical thinking as the most sought-after core skill among employers, with seven out of ten companies considering it essential in 2025. The same report also emphasized resilience, flexibility, agility, leadership, social influence, creative thinking, curiosity, and lifelong learning.

This is critical for the Philippine debate. Many commenters defend the reduction of GE in the name of employability. Yet the labor market itself increasingly values capacities that General Education is supposed to cultivate: analysis, communication, adaptability, cultural understanding, ethical reasoning, and lifelong learning.

The contradiction is obvious. People say they want college to prepare students for work, but they dismiss the very subjects that help students survive complex workplaces.

An engineer may know formulas, but if he cannot explain risk to a client, coordinate with a community, understand regulation, interpret public criticism, or confront ethical compromise, his technical knowledge is incomplete as professional formation. 

 

An accountant may know standards, but if she does not understand institutional incentives, corruption, public trust, and moral responsibility, she may become a technician of concealment rather than a guardian of accountability. 

 

A programmer may write code, but if he does not understand privacy, bias, misinformation, surveillance, labor displacement, and democratic consequences, he may build systems that harm society while claiming technical neutrality. 

 

A nurse may know procedures, but if she does not understand dignity, class inequality, family structures, language, and grief, she may treat patients as cases rather than persons. 

 

A business graduate may know management tools, but if he does not understand labor history, social inequality, public policy, and ethics, he may become efficient at exploitation.

This is why the phrase “soft skills out, robot is in” resonates. The danger is not that graduates will literally become robots. The danger is that they will be trained to function without reflection.

A robot performs, while a person judges. A robot follows instructions, while a person asks whether the instruction is right. A robot is useful, but a person is responsible. And Education that has persons studying, seriously educating should not produce robots with diplomas.

K–12 and the Job-Option Mentality

The anti-GE argument also has roots in how many Filipinos understood K–12. Support for K–12 was often sold not through a deep commitment to educational maturity, but through the promise that senior high school would provide an option to work after graduation.

This was not entirely false. Employment and entrepreneurship were among the stated objectives or rationales of senior high school. But the popular understanding often simplified this into a slogan: after senior high school, the graduate can work. Many people supported K–12 not because they believed in richer basic education, but because they believed it would create an earlier employment exit.

The evidence, however, has been complicated. A Philippine Institute for Development Studies discussion of senior high school outcomes noted that only a little over 20 percent of senior high school graduates entered the labor force, while more than 70 percent continued their education. It also noted that employment and entrepreneurship objectives needed reexamination and validation.

This weakens the assumption that senior high school has already completed the formative work that college GE supposedly repeats. If senior high school has not fully resolved employability, readiness, or maturity, then removing college-level General Education may not eliminate redundancy. It may simply create a thinner educational pipeline.

The issue is not whether K–12 should teach history, literature, ethics, citizenship, communication, and social understanding. Of course it should. The issue is whether those subjects should end there.

They should not. For the purpose of basic education is not identical to the purpose of higher education. Grade school introduces. Junior high school expands. Senior high school prepares. College deepens. The mistake is to assume that because a topic has appeared earlier, it no longer belongs later.

By that logic, mathematics after elementary school would be redundant. Science after junior high school would be redundant. Writing after senior high school would be redundant. Yet everyone knows that higher levels of maturity require higher levels of treatment.

The same is true of society, history, ethics, language, and the self. A college student should revisit these subjects because he is about to enter adult life. He is no longer merely learning about society from the outside. He is preparing to act within it.

The Self Is Not a Luxury Subject

The phrase “understanding the self” is often mocked as if it were sentimental, therapeutic, or unnecessary. But the self is not a minor topic. It is the center through which a person experiences work, family, citizenship, ambition, anxiety, moral pressure, and social belonging.

A student who enters college is usually not yet a fully formed adult. College is often the first stage where a person seriously confronts freedom, responsibility, competition, politics, sexuality, identity, money, ambition, failure, and moral choice. To pretend that technical specialization alone can guide this transition is naive.

A future engineer is not only an engineer. He is a person who will make decisions under pressure. A future architect is not only a designer. She is a person who will shape spaces where other people live. A future doctor is not only a clinician. He is a person who will encounter suffering. A future business owner is not only an entrepreneur. She is a person who will hold power over workers, customers, and communities.

Professional training without self-understanding produces competence without depth. This is why college cannot be treated merely as “skills needed in your chosen career.” A career is not separate from the person who carries it. A profession is not merely a set of tasks. It is a role within society.

The student must ask: Who am I becoming? What do I owe others? What is my country? What is justice? What is truth? What is work for? What is success? What does it mean to live well? What does my profession do to people? What kind of society am I helping build?

These are not childish questions. They are adult questions. A university that refuses to ask them produces graduates who may be skilled but spiritually and civically underdeveloped.

When Anti-Intellectualism becomes
an Economic Common Sense

The most troubling aspect of the public comments is not merely that they favor fewer GE units. Reasonable people can debate curriculum size. The troubling aspect is the confidence with which they dismiss entire fields of knowledge. “Social studies and humanities are not so relevant.” “Why study subjects not related to your career line?” “Major subjects only.” These are not neutral statements. They reflect a broader anti-intellectual culture in which knowledge is judged only by immediate utility.

Anti-intellectualism in the Philippines is often not expressed as hatred of schooling. Filipinos value diplomas. Families sacrifice for graduation. Titles matter. Board exams matter. Latin honors matter. The country is not anti-credential.

But it is often anti-intellectual. It respects the diploma but not necessarily the life of the mind. It respects the board passer but not necessarily the critic. It respects the professional title but not necessarily the person who asks historical, ethical, or political questions. It values education as social mobility but distrusts education as consciousness.

This is why people can worship college degrees while dismissing the humanities. They want the credential without the disturbance of thought.

General Education disturbs because it asks students to think beyond the immediate. It asks them to read society, question power, understand history, interpret culture, and confront moral complexity. These things are uncomfortable. They do not always lead to easy answers. They may even make students dissatisfied with the world they are being trained to enter.

But that is part of education. A university should not merely adjust students to reality. It should help them understand reality, including its injustices.

Anti-Intellectualism and the Shrinking of Humanity

If one may ponder further, the dismissal of General Education reveals not only a narrow view of college, but a diminished view of humanity itself.

For many who oppose basic subjects in college, history is treated as little more than nostalgia: “when I was young,” “in my time,” “we came out fine,” or “that has nothing to do with me.” History becomes a scrapbook of personal memory rather than a serious study of power, institutions, struggle, identity, and consequence. It is no longer the discipline that explains why societies become unequal, why nations rise or fail, why colonial habits survive, why corruption repeats itself, or why citizens inherit problems they did not personally create. It becomes reduced to anecdote.

That is dangerous. A person who says “history has nothing to do with me” is often already living inside history without knowing it. His language, wages, laws, religion, land, school system, passport, job market, family migration, public transport, taxes, and political choices are all historical products. To deny history is not to escape it. It is merely to become unconscious of it.

The same impoverishment happens with philosophy. Instead of being understood as the discipline of reason, ethics, meaning, truth, justice, and the good life, philosophy is caricatured as useless abstraction—or worse, reduced to a crude hedonism: do what makes you happy, earn money, avoid inconvenience, and pursue comfort. In that flattened worldview, thinking about duty, dignity, sacrifice, justice, responsibility, or the common good becomes impractical. The human person is reduced to appetite, preference, and consumption.

Art and literature suffer the same vulgar reduction. Instead of being seen as forms of human expression, memory, imagination, beauty, grief, protest, and moral insight, they are trivialized as entertainment, showbiz gossip, scandal, or pornography. The novel becomes mere drama. Poetry becomes sentimentality. Theater becomes celebrity. Painting becomes decoration. Film becomes either escapism or gossip material. The arts are stripped of their capacity to reveal suffering, deepen empathy, preserve culture, and make people confront truths that statistics alone cannot express.

Then one must ask: is this still humanity? If history is dismissed as irrelevant, philosophy as useless, literature as gossip, art as vulgar entertainment, ethics as common sense, and citizenship as a distraction from employment, what remains of education? What remains of the person? Only the worker. Only the consumer. Only the taxpayer. Only the graduate with a credential and a function.

This is precisely the danger of replacing education with mere upskilling. It does not merely change the curriculum. It changes the image of the human being. The student is no longer treated as a person capable of memory, judgment, imagination, responsibility, and moral struggle. He is treated as a unit of labor preparing for market absorption.

That is why the defense of General Education is ultimately a defense of human depth. History reminds the student that he belongs to a story larger than himself. Philosophy teaches him that not all desires are wise and not all profitable actions are just. Literature allows him to inhabit lives other than his own. Art trains perception and imagination. Ethics forces him to confront responsibility. Social science teaches him that private suffering often has public causes.

Without these, college may still produce graduates. But it will produce graduates who are less capable of understanding what it means to be human in society.

The issue, therefore, is not whether every GE subject is perfectly taught. Many are not. The issue is whether the university should abandon the very disciplines that prevent education from becoming mechanical. Once history becomes nostalgia, philosophy becomes hedonism, art becomes gossip, and literature becomes vulgar entertainment, the university has not become more practical. It has become less human.

The Business Case for General Education

From a business perspective, the anti-GE argument is short-sighted. It assumes that employability is best served by narrowing education. But modern economies do not reward narrowness for long. They reward adaptability.

A graduate trained only for the first job may become obsolete when the job changes. A graduate trained to think, communicate, learn, and understand systems can move across roles, industries, and crises.

This is especially true in an economy shaped by automation and artificial intelligence. If machines increasingly perform routine technical tasks, then human value shifts toward judgment, interpretation, creativity, ethical reasoning, coordination, and social intelligence. A person who knows only procedure competes with machines. A person who can think across context remains valuable.

This is not anti-business. It is good business. Companies do not collapse only because workers lack technical skills. They collapse because managers misread society, leaders lack ethics, teams cannot communicate, institutions ignore history, executives misunderstand culture, and organizations confuse short-term profit with long-term trust.

The corporate world is full of technically competent people who fail upward because they lack moral seriousness. It is also full of brilliant specialists who cannot lead because they cannot communicate. It is full of managers who understand targets but not people. It is full of organizations that have data but no wisdom.

General Education cannot solve all these problems, but it addresses their foundations. A strong GE curriculum teaches students to read carefully, write clearly, argue honestly, understand evidence, recognize historical patterns, interpret culture, confront ethical problems, and situate themselves within society. These are not ornamental skills. They are management skills, leadership skills, citizenship skills, and survival skills.

The market may hire technical ability at entry level. But careers advance through judgment.

The Tradesman Contradiction

There is another contradiction in the so-called practical argument. Many of those who dismiss General Education as useless because college should prepare students for work would likely reject the most genuinely practical version of professional formation: requiring future professionals to pass through actual productive work before entering professional status.

If the argument is truly that college must be practical, then why stop at removing humanities and social sciences? Why not require a future civil engineer to experience construction work before designing structures? Why not require a future architect to understand carpentry, masonry, site logistics, materials, and the physical realities of building? Why not require a future mechanical engineer to work with mechanics, machine operators, factory workers, and maintenance crews before designing industrial systems? Why not require future industrial engineers to spend time on the production floor, not merely in classrooms and simulations? Why not require business students to understand warehouses, farms, ports, factories, retail floors, call centers, and delivery systems before they become managers? If the goal is practicality, then apprenticeship, shop-floor experience, and industry immersion are more practical than simply deleting GE units.

But of course, many of the same voices would resist that. They want practicality only in its cheapest form. They want fewer subjects, shorter schooling, lower tuition, and faster employment. They do not necessarily want the harder discipline of industrial formation.

They want the college degree to become a job ticket, not the professional to become deeply formed by both theory and practice.

This distinction is important. A serious industrial country does not simply say, “Remove humanities and teach only major subjects.” A serious industrial country builds systems that connect school, work, theory, apprenticeship, industry standards, public investment, and social purpose.

Germany is often cited because of its dual vocational training system. The German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training explains that the dual system is characterized by two learning venues and recognized training occupations; apprentices train in companies while also receiving formal vocational education. Switzerland follows a similar principle. Its vocational education and training system is predominantly dual, combining three to four days of practical training in a company with one to two days of theoretical classes in vocational and general educational subjects.

Germany’s universities of applied sciences also emphasize applied learning, as the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) describes them as institutions where application relevance and vocational orientation are prioritized, with students commonly participating in laboratory work, project groups, internships, and practical semesters.

These countries do not treat practicality as mere cost-cutting. They institutionalize it. That is the difference. Real practical education is demanding. It requires companies to train. It requires schools to coordinate. It requires standards, supervision, wages, assessment, equipment, and long-term national planning. It treats workers, technicians, and professionals as part of one industrial ecosystem.

The Philippine anti-GE argument, by contrast, often stops at removal. "Remove subjects." "Reduce units." "Lower cost." "Finish faster." "Get a job." That is not industrialization. That is austerity dressed up as practicality.

Industrialization Requires More Than Major Subjects

The Philippines has long dreamed of industrialization but has often lacked the social discipline required for it. True industrialization is not achieved simply by producing more engineering graduates. It requires technicians, machinists, toolmakers, electricians, designers, planners, logistics workers, managers, researchers, builders, and public institutions that can coordinate production. But it also requires respect for labor, innovation, and creativity. This is where the anti-GE argument becomes especially weak. It claims to be practical, but it rarely argues for the dignity of skilled trades. It rarely says that the future engineer should first understand the worker. It rarely says that the architect should learn from the mason. It rarely says that the manager should understand the factory floor. It rarely says that universities should partner deeply with industry to build apprenticeship systems.

Instead, it says: remove social studies and humanities. That is not a development strategy. It is a tuition complaint. A country serious about industrialization would not see General Education and industrial training as enemies. It would strengthen both. It would produce engineers who understand materials and history, architects who understand design and community, managers who understand finance and labor, programmers who understand code and ethics, technicians who understand machines and national development.

The industrial professional must not be shallow. He must know technique, but he must also understand purpose. Without purpose, technical skill becomes subcontracted labor for someone else’s development.

This is especially important for the Philippines, a country that has often exported labor rather than built domestic industrial capacity. If higher education is reduced to immediate employability, the country may produce graduates who are good at fitting into available jobs but poor at imagining new industries, new institutions, and new national directions.

Upskilling prepares people to enter the existing economy. While Education prepares people to question and transform the economy. A developing country needs both. But if it abandons the second, it becomes permanently adaptive rather than sovereign.

The False War Between Major Subjects and General Education

The public debate often creates a false war: "major subjects versus General Education". This is a bad framing. Engineering students should study engineering seriously. Accountancy students should master accounting. Nursing students should master nursing. Architecture students should master design, structure, materials, and building systems. Computer science students should master programming, algorithms, systems, data, and security.

No serious defender of General Education argues that students should be weak in their major fields. The question is whether specialization alone is enough. It is not. A major subject gives professional depth. General Education gives human breadth. A major subject trains the student to perform within a field. General Education helps the student understand the field’s relation to society.

Engineering without ethics can produce unsafe infrastructure. Architecture without social understanding can produce alienating spaces. Business without history can repeat old exploitation. Technology without philosophy can normalize surveillance. Medicine without humanities can become cold and mechanical. Law without moral imagination can become procedural cruelty. Education without culture can become test preparation. Public administration without political theory can become bureaucratic obedience. The major teaches competence while GE teaches context. The two should reinforce each other. The better reform is not to abolish or drastically weaken GE, but to redesign it so that it speaks more clearly to the student’s formation and profession.

Philippine history for engineers should include infrastructure, colonial development, public works, disasters, land use, and state capacity.
Ethics for business students should include corruption, labor, taxation, financial manipulation, consumer protection, and corporate social responsibility.
Communication for computer science students should include documentation, public explanation of risk, AI governance, and translation of technical issues for nontechnical audiences.
Literature and art for architecture students should include space, memory, identity, community, and beauty.
Sociology for health sciences should include inequality, public health, family structures, gender, migration, and access to care.
Political science for all students should include the Constitution, institutions, citizenship, rights, public accountability, and democratic participation.

That is not redundancy. That is integration.

Reform GE, Do Not Gut It

The defense of General Education should not become a defense of mediocrity. Critics are not entirely wrong when they complain that some GE courses feel repetitive, uninspired, or disconnected from student life. There are real problems.

Some college GE subjects are taught as if students were still in high school. Some syllabi are overloaded with memorization. Some courses are handled mechanically. Some instructors lack support, training, or updated materials. Some universities treat GE as a service load rather than as the foundation of undergraduate formation. Some students experience GE as compliance rather than awakening.

These are valid criticisms. But poor implementation does not invalidate the purpose. The answer to bad General Education is better General Education, not less education.

A serious reform would begin with evaluation. The Philippine Social Science Council argued that the GE proposal raised substantive, procedural, and evidentiary concerns. It said there appeared to be no publicly available evaluation of the current GE curriculum that would justify the reframing, and it criticized the subordination of education to market rationality.

That critique is important. Reform should be evidence-based. If the current GE curriculum has redundancies, prove them. If certain competencies are already mastered in senior high school, show the data. If some courses need consolidation, explain why. If new competencies are needed, design them carefully. If faculty will be displaced, address the labor impact. If students need lighter loads, examine tuition, scheduling, advising, and program design as a whole.

But do not simply invoke “employability” as a magic word. A better General Education reform would include several principles.

First, GE should be developmental, not repetitive. College courses should assume that students have prior exposure but need deeper adult treatment. 

Second, GE should be interdisciplinary but not vague. Interdisciplinarity should not become an excuse to dissolve history, philosophy, literature, social science, and ethics into shallow modules. 

Third, GE should be connected to professions without becoming subordinate to them. Ethics, history, and communication should speak to professional life while retaining their broader human and civic purpose. 

Fourth, GE should train students to write, argue, research, interpret, and deliberate. These are not luxuries. They are foundations of citizenship and leadership. 

Fifth, GE should be taught well. A poorly taught humanities course can make students hate the humanities. A poorly taught history course can make history seem dead. A poorly taught ethics course can make morality seem like empty sermonizing. The quality of teaching matters. 

Sixth, GE should help students understand the Philippines. A Filipino college education that does not deepen knowledge of Philippine society, institutions, history, culture, economy, and political life is incomplete.

The goal is not to preserve every existing unit. The goal is to preserve the educational mission.

The Class Character of the Debate

The GE debate also exposes a class tension. For wealthier students, General Education may be seen as enrichment. They can afford electives, internships, travel, books, language training, cultural exposure, and extracurricular experiences. Even if formal GE is reduced, many elite students will still receive broad formation through family background, networks, private schooling, and social capital. For poorer students, however, college may be one of the few places where they encounter serious discussions of history, politics, literature, ethics, culture, and society beyond survival. If GE is weakened, the poor may lose access to the very intellectual formation that the privileged can obtain elsewhere.

This is the hidden inequality behind “practicality.” When the poor are told to study only job skills, while the rich continue to receive broad cultural and intellectual formation, education becomes stratified. The poor are trained for employability. The rich are educated for leadership.

That is dangerous. A democratic society should not reserve broad education for those who can afford it. It should not tell poor students that philosophy is unnecessary, history is a luxury, literature is irrelevant, and citizenship can wait until after employment.

If anything, students from economically pressured backgrounds need broader education precisely because they are often forced by circumstance into narrow choices. Education should expand their world, not merely prepare them to accept its limits.

This is why the anti-GE argument, though often spoken in the language of compassion for parents, can become socially regressive. It says: because families are poor, let us give students less education. But perhaps the more just answer is: because families are poor, let us make education more affordable without making it intellectually poorer.

The solution to high educational cost should not be intellectual austerity. It should be public investment, better curriculum design, fairer financing, stronger state universities, improved teaching, and more coherent pathways between school and work.

Reducing the poor student’s education to employability is not liberation. It is containment.

The Republic Needs Educated Citizens,
Not Only Skilled Workers

A country is not a company. Its people are not merely human resources. Its universities are not merely labor suppliers.

A republic needs citizens. Citizens must understand history, institutions, rights, duties, public reason, propaganda, corruption, law, and national interest. They must be able to evaluate claims, recognize manipulation, and participate in collective life.

If students leave college knowing their major but unable to understand their country, democracy suffers. This is especially urgent in the Philippines, where public life is saturated with misinformation, patronage, dynastic politics, historical distortion, shallow media, and personality-driven elections. A citizen who has never been trained to think historically or critically is easier to manipulate. A voter who does not understand institutions becomes vulnerable to spectacle. A professional who has no civic formation may treat public problems as someone else’s concern.

General Education is not a guarantee against bad citizenship. Educated people can still be corrupt, foolish, or cowardly. But without broad education, the public sphere becomes even weaker.

The social sciences and humanities do not merely teach facts. They teach interpretation. They teach students that society is made, not natural; that institutions have histories; that inequality has causes; that language can manipulate; that culture carries memory; that power must be examined; that moral choices are embedded in systems.

These are civic capacities. And a republic that removes them from higher education in the name of employability is not becoming efficient. It is becoming vulnerable.

The Worker Also Deserves Education

There is a false assumption in the anti-GE argument: that workers need skills, while elites need education.

This must be rejected. The worker deserves education. The engineer deserves education. The nurse deserves education. The technician deserves education. The call center agent deserves education. The factory worker deserves education. The future migrant worker deserves education.

Education should not be reserved for those who will become professors, lawyers, or policymakers. The person who works with machines still lives in society. The person who writes code still faces ethical choices. The person who repairs engines still votes. The person who handles accounts still participates in institutions. The person who builds houses still belongs to a nation.

To say that ordinary students need only job skills is to diminish them. This is why “upskilling” is not enough. Upskilling can be useful and necessary, but it is not the same as education. Upskilling improves performance within a role. Education enlarges the person beyond the role.|

Upskilling asks: what can you do for the employer?  

Education asks: what can you understand as a human being?

Upskilling is often short-term. Education is formative. Upskilling adapts the worker to the economy. Education allows the person to question the economy. A humane society needs both, but it must never confuse them.

What a Serious Business Community Should Say

The business community should be careful not to support a narrow reduction of education in the name of workforce readiness. Employers may understandably want graduates who can work immediately. But good businesses should also want graduates who can grow.

A company that hires only for immediate technical fit may save on training in the short term, but it may also inherit workers who lack adaptability. A country that narrows college to job preparation may produce graduates ready for today’s tasks but unprepared for tomorrow’s disruptions.

Businesses need employees who can communicate with clients, manage teams, interpret regulation, understand public sentiment, respond to crises, and learn new tools. They need people who can explain, persuade, write, analyze, and decide. These capacities do not come only from major subjects.

Business leaders should therefore resist the temptation to treat General Education as waste. The better business position is to demand better GE: more relevant, more rigorous, more connected to real problems, but still broad and humanistic.

A serious business community should say: we need technically competent graduates, but we also need thinking professionals.

The country needs engineers who can communicate risk.

The country needs accountants who understand public trust.

The country needs IT professionals who understand ethics.

The country needs managers who understand labor and culture.

The country needs entrepreneurs who understand society.

The country needs workers who can adapt because they know how to learn.

That is a more mature business position than simply demanding fewer units.

A Better Model: Integration, Not Elimination

The way forward should not be a rigid defense of the status quo. General Education must evolve. The world has changed. Technology, work, politics, and culture are changing. Students face new pressures. Families face real costs. Universities must respond.

But the response should be integration, not elimination. A reformed GE curriculum could be organized around several themes.

First, self and society: identity, mental life, social roles, family, class, labor, gender, citizenship, and responsibility.

Second, Philippine history and institutions: not mere memorization, but historical consciousness, constitutionalism, governance, colonial legacies, development, and national sovereignty.

Third, ethics and professional responsibility: applied to business, engineering, health, technology, law, public service, education, and media.

Fourth, communication and public reason: writing, argumentation, rhetoric, presentation, research, digital literacy, and misinformation analysis.

Fifth, science, technology, and society: innovation, environment, risk, artificial intelligence, privacy, automation, and public welfare.

Sixth, culture, art, and imagination: literature, aesthetics, memory, language, heritage, and creative interpretation.

Seventh, economy, labor, and development: work, production, industrialization, inequality, globalization, migration, and national planning.

Such a curriculum would not be redundant. It would be adult formation for a complex society.

It would also answer the legitimate complaint that GE often feels disconnected from majors. Under this model, students would not merely take isolated subjects. They would encounter broad questions through the lens of their future professions and civic lives.

The engineering student would not simply study ethics in the abstract, but he would confront infrastructure failure, procurement corruption, environmental risk, public safety, and urban inequality. The business student would not merely study society as theory, but she would examine labor, markets, taxation, consumer behavior, inequality, and corporate power. The computer science student would not merely study technology as neutral, but he would examine AI, data privacy, algorithmic bias, platform power, and digital manipulation. The education student would not merely study communication, but she would study language, inequality, pedagogy, cultural memory, and democratic formation. And all these is what is the GE reform worth having.

The Cost Question Must Be Answered Honestly

Defenders of General Education must not ignore cost. Families are not wrong to worry about tuition. Students are not wrong to resent wasted units. Parents are not wrong to ask whether a curriculum is efficient.

The mistake is to answer cost by cutting intellectual formation. There are other ways to address cost: better public subsidy, stronger state universities, improved credit transfer, more coherent senior high-to-college alignment, fewer unnecessary institutional fees, better advising, summer bridging options, online supplementary materials, shared public courseware, and stronger regulation of programs that overload students without clear educational value.

If redundancy exists, remove actual redundancy. If courses repeat high school content, redesign them. If students are overburdened, rationalize the whole curriculum. If GE is poorly taught, improve teaching. If families are drowning in costs, increase support.

But do not pretend that deleting humanities and social sciences is automatically pro-poor. A poorer curriculum is not a gift to the poor. The real pro-poor position is affordable education with intellectual dignity.

The Danger of Credentialed Narrowness

If the proposed direction is taken too far, the Philippines may produce a generation of credentialed narrowness.

Credentialed narrowness means graduates with diplomas but limited historical consciousness. Graduates with technical skills but weak ethical reasoning. Graduates who can pass board exams but cannot understand institutions. Graduates who can follow workplace instructions but cannot question social injustice. Graduates who can operate systems but cannot ask who benefits from those systems. Graduates who are employable but not educated.

This is not a minor danger. It affects governance, business, technology, culture, and democracy. A country full of narrowly trained professionals may still have weak institutions. It may build roads but tolerate corruption. It may produce nurses but neglect public health. It may train IT workers but fail to protect privacy. It may produce accountants but normalize financial manipulation. It may graduate teachers but weaken national memory. Technical skill without civic and ethical formation does not guarantee development. It may simply make bad systems more efficient.

The Real Meaning of Practical Education

Practical education is not the enemy of General Education. In fact, the best General Education is practical in the deepest sense.

It is practical to know how to communicate clearly.
It is practical to understand the society where one works. 

It is practical to know history so one does not repeat institutional mistakes. 

It is practical to understand ethics before entering a profession full of temptations. 

It is practical to know how power works. 

It is practical to understand labor before becoming a manager. 

It is practical to understand culture before designing products, policies, buildings, or services. 

It is practical to understand the self before entering a life of work, pressure, ambition, and compromise.

The anti-GE commenters use a narrow definition of practicality. For them, practical means directly tied to the job. But life is larger than a job, and even jobs are larger than technical tasks.

A real practical education forms the person for work, society, citizenship, and change.

Conclusion: Do Not Reduce Education
into mere Upskilling

The debate over General Education is not merely about CHED. It is about the Philippine imagination of education.

If college is treated only as a job ticket, then General Education will always appear excessive. If the student is seen only as future labor, then history, ethics, literature, philosophy, sociology, art, and citizenship will always seem secondary. If poverty is allowed to define the limits of aspiration, then the poor will be offered training while the privileged keep education.

That is not reform. That is surrender. The Philippines needs skilled workers. It needs engineers, architects, nurses, accountants, teachers, technicians, programmers, managers, builders, and entrepreneurs. But it also needs citizens, thinkers, critics, leaders, and persons with moral and historical depth.

The choice is not between major subjects and General Education. The choice is between narrow training and serious formation. A serious country does not reduce college to employability. A serious country makes education relevant without making it shallow. A serious country builds industrial skills without despising humanities. A serious country values work without reducing the person to labor.

Those who call General Education redundant often reveal more than they intend. They reveal a belief that college is merely a purchase of job skills. They reveal the pressure of economic survival, but also the poverty of an anti-intellectual culture. They reveal a society that wants credentials but is impatient with thought.

That is precisely why General Education remains necessary. The university must not become a factory of technically trained obedience. It must remain a place where students learn not only how to work, but how to understand the world in which they work.

The Philippines does not need robots with diplomas. It needs educated persons.

***

References

Commission on Higher Education. (2013). CHED Memorandum Order No. 20, series of 2013: General Education Curriculum—Holistic understandings, intellectual and civic competencies. (Pacu.org.ph)

Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training. (2024). Training process and training skills areas within the German dual VET system. (BIBB)

German Academic Exchange Service. (2024). Universities of applied sciences. (www.daad.de)

Philippine Institute for Development Studies. (2020). Senior high school graduates’ prospects and challenges in the labor market. (PIDS)

Philippine News Agency. (2026, May 14). CHED delays rollout of reframed curriculum to 2028. (Philippine News Agency)

Philippine Social Science Council. (2026). Official position of PSSC re: GE reform. (Philippine Social Science Council)

Republic Act No. 7722. (1994). Higher Education Act of 1994. (Supreme Court E-Library)

Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education. (2024). Vocational education and training. (EDK)

World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. (World Economic Forum)