The Proposed Removal of 3 GE Courses from the College Curriculum
By Oliver Perater (MSU-IIT)
Education comes from the Latin word ‘educare’ which literally means "to bring out," "to lead forth," or "to nourish”. It means the development of the whole person, i.e., one’s character and humanity, and not just transfer of knowledge and skills. Its primary task is to liberate and never to enslave.
I list down below some of the possible reasons behind the proposed reforms in Philippine Education.
1. Cost Efficiency
It is cost efficient at the expense of quality, holistic, depth of education, and human development. It is a wrong economic measure.
2. Neo-Liberal Agenda
This is not an ideological shift in education because it has been the case for quite some time. Education for too long has been shaped to serve the demands of the global market. The idea is to produce a globally competitive workforce, an idea which could appear to be good and appealing to some uncritical minds.
3. Cultivation of Docile and Uncritical Manpower
Stripping down the Ethics, Art Appreciation, and Contemporary World weakens the fields that foster critical thinking and socio-political consciousness & involvement. It could lead to technical proficiency with no political awareness. This will make corruption, exploitation, and neo-colonization easier to normalize. The goal is to produce efficient, docile, and obedient labor forces who deliver tasks but with no critical thinking abilities and no sense of humanity.
4. Anti-Democratic Impulse
These planned reforms in education are figured out and to be imposed without consultation and genuine dialogue with the experts involve such as philosophers, sociologists, historians, and other independent scholars revealing an anti-democratic impulse. It seems that they don’t think education as public good and human right but as problems of management that only require managers to resolve. No wonder DepEd keeps on failing to deliver competent graduates.
5. The Issue of Redundancy
Some college subjects are indeed redundant, having already been covered in high school. However, based on my experience teaching Ethics, one of the main challenges is how to make my students fall in love with the subject precisely because it is new to them. This shows that not all General Education (GE) courses are redundant. And even when some topics are repeated, teachers would be surprised at how little students actually know. DepEd has failed terribly in producing graduates with reading comprehension—so who are they to propose such an ill-conceived recommendation to CHED?
6. Possible Effects or Aims
It will create a society of docile, obedient, and mindless middle class work force, not necessarily good citizens but certainly enslaved. They don’t know whether their government is doing right or wrong, just or unjust, but they certainly know how to make drones, bridges, computers, formulate codes, list down debits and credits and everything that the global market demands.
Civil engineers would know how to build roads and school buildings, but they may not even understand why good roads are to be destroyed and replaced while centenarian school buildings cannot be demolished and be replaced with bigger modern buildings even if it is necessary and far more functional and useful.
Medical practitioners would know how to cure patients but may not understand why it is wrong to deny poor patients the treatment they need.
Accountants would know how to figure out whether the company is making a profit or not but may not comprehend the notion of exploitation and how it could be the most important factor in making profits.
Military commanders would know how to win wars but would never understand which side is truly right and just.
Art Appreciation, Ethics and The Contemporary World may not be enough to prevent the making of docile, obedient, and uncritical middle class, we need more powerful subjects such as political philosophy, social philosophy, and many other social sciences to achieve that. But removing them from college curriculum is either a case of mindlessness or a deliberate strategy of social control.
