The question about what sort of individuals the educational system should produce may sound pedagogical, but at its core, it is anthropological and sociological: how do we imagine the society we want to create, and what role will educational institutions assume in shaping it?
In May 2025, the Department of Education (DepEd) proposed transferring three GE courses—Art Appreciation, Contemporary World, and Ethics—from the higher education curriculum to high school. Shortly thereafter, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian filed the Three-Year College Education (3CE) Act to compress college education into three academic years and prioritize specialized courses.
A draft memorandum from the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) dated April 2026, advanced this agenda by proposing a reduction in General Education (GE) units for undergraduate programs from around 36 down to 18-21 units. As of this writing, humanities and social sciences subjects (HUMSS) have been decreased to a single Life and Works of Rizal course. The science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects have not been spared either.
At stake here is the credo of Philippine higher education itself: is the university primarily an apparatus for workforce preparation, or is it also a space for cultivating reflective, ethical, critically thinking, and nationally grounded citizens?
A closer examination of these reforms unfolds their underlying motivation: to produce internationalized, job-ready workers at the expense of all-encompassing education, cultivating blindly apolitical students who will only be fed into the mouth of globalization’s market logic. These reforms now present an absurd proposal—a drift toward diploma mills. GE subjects are myopically reconceived as a burden to be endured by students.
The establishment of GE courses in higher education rests on the idea of holistic learning. Its framework was designed in such a way that the intellect is disciplined for its own sake and for its own highest culture, which is how John Henry Cardinal Newman argued in The Idea of a University (1852).
However, this push toward specialization stems from globalization’s demands for competitive labor. Professionals are encouraged to prioritize marketable skills that are useful in the assembly lines of the global supply chain. After having achieved such a level of skill, they have little to no choice but to be drawn into the global market and the multinational big business that runs it.
While it is inevitable that educational institutions must prepare students for a competitive job market, inculcating the notion that employment and individual contribution define the purpose of learning deprives them of holistic formation—their right to develop as fully realized individuals. Restricting students to vocational skills further isolates them from broader societal contexts, but a free society cannot sustain itself on technical competence alone.
In the past few years, there has also been a seemingly systematic erasure of the humanities and social sciences in the Philippine educational system: as early as 2014, Philippine history was already removed from high school curricula; removal of required Filipino language and literature in the tertiary level in 2018; the 2023 MATATAG reduced arts and music subjects in grades 1 to 10 to a single integrated component; and the removal of Sports and Arts & Design in senior high school (SHS) strands and the shift to clusters of electives between Academic and Technical-Professional tracks. Amid these drastic changes, DepEd and CHED are now pushing for the “downloading” of college GE subjects to the Senior High School program.
Such industry-oriented changes produce graduates lacking historical consciousness, empathy, and creative capacity to imagine and build a just and humane society. At no level—from primary to tertiary—should education be reduced to the production of automatons incapable of questioning a dehumanizing existence.
As such, universities and colleges have devolved from intellectual sanctuaries into a flea market. This commodified model, in turn, has been exported into the national education system.
The policymakers may have acknowledged the youth’s pivotal role as builders and inheritors of national development, yet they have neglected the fact that sustainable progress can only be made through strengthening our domestic industry and producing a workforce educated across several disciplines—goals unattainable under this neoliberal education system. How can the youth assume the responsibility of stabilizing domestic capabilities if they are conditioned to stay in their line or go abroad?
As we find ourselves in a world where human agency is threatened by unbridled capitalism, the violence of oppressive governments, and divisive discourse fueled by disinformation, students need to be equipped with the faculty of discernment and the ability to make humane judgments in everyday life.
In our case in Ateneo de Davao University, this imperative demands that Ateneans must look beyond personal ambition or professional gain and develop a sense of obligation to engage with complex social realities and challenge injustices. This mandate of service will not only be met through reading books, writing papers, or solving equations in insulated rooms, but through struggling for better education for all to contribute meaningfully to national development. Be that as it may, GE courses cannot be detached from our local struggles and collective aspirations as a people.
Affirming the inestimable value of the humanities and social sciences in shaping creative, critical, and empowered human beings—this vision insists that education must not be reduced to a mere instrument of economic survival, as the future of humanity rests upon it. This, then, will yield college graduates rooted in the Philippine social realities, champions of academic freedom, and agents of transformation in a society that has long been mired in spiralling crises.
Editor’s Note: This article was first issued in the January to May 2026 Second Semester Newsletter of Atenews.
