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