We, education stakeholders, who are guided by past experiences with CHED’s reduction of General Education (GE) curriculum, OPPOSE the so-called “Reframed General Education Curriculum Component” (RGECC), CALL UPON CHED to DISCARD the said draft and conduct broader, deeper, and more meaningful discussions to produce a new GE curriculum that reflects the insights of stakeholders and responds to the needs of our communities, and CALL UPON other education stakeholders, education agencies, EDCOM2, Congress, Senate, and the Executive Branch to reverse the usual top-down education reform processes in our country.

Our call to DISCARD the RGECC is based on the following grounds:

1) The RGECC marks a departure from the classical liberal education tradition, which envisions a common intellectual core—a shared “language” allowing students to navigate and actively contest,  transform the public sphere and to prepare for the obligation of citizens for democracy. Such a departure will only further worsen the state of our education system.  

The true horizon of GE is not instrumental job-readiness, but the cultivation of an autonomous mind. Its purpose is to foster “citizen-subjects” with the wisdom to interrogate tradition and the imagination to envision a reality beyond the present. A robust GE program must prioritize the generation of critical consciousness over mere market employability and accumulation of human capital, providing the tools necessary to dismantle systemic inequalities and the lingering shadows of colonial thought. Hence, the so-called “reframing” of GE goes against what GE should be. 

Instead of a democratic, philosophical deliberation on what a Filipino citizen needs in the 21st century, the reframing feels like a rushed response to “Gig Economy” pressures and the “AI panic.” You get a fragmented list of competencies that don’t relate to each other. It’s a “Frankenstein’s Monster” of a curriculum—stitched together from corporate buzzwords rather than a coherent vision of humanity.

By stripping away what some bureaucrats and big businessmen consider as “useless” Liberal Arts—the things that only a university can provide—CHED is ironically making the case that universities are unnecessary. Through the draft RGECC, CHED is divided against itself: it wants to be an Academic Leader, but it acts like a Human Resources Department; it wants to “save” GE, but it treats GE as a burden to be minimized if not wiped out; it claims to promote “Critical Thinking,” but it creates a framework that excludes anyone who thinks outside the “Responsible Conclusion” of market efficiency; it pays lip service to “nationalism” and other glittering generalities but has abolished/intends to abolish most spaces in the curriculum where nationalism can be cultivated (Filipino, Panitikan, Philippine Government & Constitution, and Readings in Philippine History subjects, to name a few).

2) The further reduction of the GE curriculum from 36 units to just 18 units is simply unacceptable as the current GE is already bare-bones and trimmed down, all the more after the Senior High School (SHS) core courses were also recently pared down from 15 core subjects to just 5 core subjects.

Majority of the subjects removed or poised to be removed are in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences, which, ironically, are at the heart of genuinely holistic GE in many parts of the world. Hence, the RGECC will essentially remove the heart and soul of the GE curriculum.

Way back in 2014, Filipino, Panitikan, and Philippine Government & Constitution subjects were already removed as mandatory core courses. Now, the RGECC proposal would remove Understanding the Self, Contemporary World, Purposive Communication, Art Appreciation, Ethics, Readings in Philippine History, Mathematics in the Modern World, and Science and Technology and Society as mandatory and separate GE subjects. 

In the list of new revised mandatory SHS core courses, the following subjects were removed: Oral Communication; Reading and Writing Skills; 21ˢᵗ Century Literature from the Philippines and the World: Media and Information Literacy; Komunikasyon at Pananaliksik sa Wika at Kulturang Filipino; Pagbasa at Pagsuri ng Iba’t ibang Teksto Tungo sa Pananaliksik; Personal Development; Physical Education (Fitness, Sports, Dance, Recreational Activities)/HOPE; Disaster and Risk Reduction Management; Understanding Culture, Politics, and Society; Contemporary Philippine Arts from the Regions; and Introduction to Philosophy of the Human Person. 

3) The market-driven, job-centric framework of the RGECC which treats HEIs as merely factories of employable workers rather than shapers of socially conscious citizens, does not respond to our people’s needs in a world of wars, genocide, and inequality where we need MORE, not less GE. 

The RGECC is thus just part and parcel of other related policies that continue to reorient Philippine education toward narrow labor-market training, while diminishing its role in cultivating critical thinking, historical consciousness, and social responsibility. These reforms do not solve and do not address the deep structural problems in education.

Time and again, we have seen the effects of hollowing out the heart of every curriculum: a world of tyrants, wars, and cruelty, with the education system failing to equip the people with adequate tools to analyze and respond to the crises.

It is tragic that some education bureaucrats push for the prospective removal of subjects such as Understanding Culture, Society & Politics; Contemporary World, and Ethics in a time of global extreme climate change that worsens food insecurity and other problems, televised and livestreamed genocide in Gaza, rise of anti-migrant and racist groups, and
ever-increasing possibilities of another world war. 

The inclusion of “Scientific, Data-Informed, and Ethical Inquiry” in the RGECC must also be scrutinized. The draft RGECC seemingly, superficially incorporated Ethics in the said RGECC subject. We note however, that in the RGECC, the outcome is premised on the use of “scientific reasoning and basic quantitative/qualitative methods” side-by-side with “ethical judgment,” implying that ethical judgment comes afterwards. Ethics is the systematic study of moral principles and must come before one can make a moral judgement.  In this model, we first look at “what the data says” and then use “ethical judgment” to decide how to use it. True ethics should question why the data was collected in the first place and whose interests the “scientific reasoning” serves. Here, ethics is just the “safety rail” on a pre-built track, not the compass. Hence, the RGECC seemingly finds it easy to marginalize, if not, wipe out Ethics as a separate subject in the college GE, despite our times’ obvious need for such. 

The non-inclusion of Filipino, Panitikan (Literature), Philippine Government & Constitution, and Readings in Philippine History subjects—all evidently essential in bringing our students closer to our own communities and cultures, and empowering them to become effective communicators of our people’s aspirations and well-informed and inspired shapers of our collective future—in the RGECC means that it retains and even multiplies the flaws of the current curriculum. Rather than bring the education system closer to what our country needs, the RGECC prioritizes market needs, job-centrism, and artificial international benchmarking, neglecting the fact that every country has its own needs and aspirations which should be reflected in the GE, rather than instrumentalize GE to blindly copy what other countries purportedly do.

If the overriding concern of our education is employment, we run the risk of treading the path of misguided philosophy of education. If our students are trained in the liberal arts, in a critical way, they can also be good employees, but not just employees but also citizens who are able to discern truth from fake news, right from wrong and so on.

Adherents of the obliteration of SHS core subjects and college GE subjects purportedly want the curricula to focus on employability and job-related skills as if core subjects and GE subjects don’t contribute to preparing students for a job and as if education is meant to be merely preparation for the job market, rather than a holistic molding of the heart, mind, body, and soul for students to eventually become citizens who are capable of critically analyzing society and positively transforming the world. Strengthened teaching of the Social Sciences and Humanities ensures that our graduates develop their creativity and critical thinking, something that would give them more agency in the outside world. 

4) The draft CHED memorandum on the RGECC falsely claims that there are “curriculum redundancies between Senior High School and college GE courses,” which they use as an argument for further trimming down the GE curriculum in college. 

The nature of GE for SHS and GE for college must be clarified: the former emphasizes competencies, while the latter is about broader and deeper inquiry towards a socially transformative worldview. Hence, strengthening GE in both levels must be pursued. There is no redundancy in nominally similar GE courses in SHS and college, unless they are proven to have the same structure, content, and syllabus (which will never happen as universities revise all these on a regular basis).  Indeed, the drafters of the RGECC did not conduct any formal study and curriculum mapping to back up their wrong claims on alleged “redundancies.” Granted for the sake of argument that some overlaps and redundancies are spotted, the remedy is to revise the GE offerings to ensure that unnecessary overlaps and redundancies are avoided, while retaining the core courses in SHS and also the GE subjects in college.  

If done correctly, on top of the core subjects in SHS, GE in college is an additional, huge investment with bountiful yields in terms of equipping students with the necessary qualities of mind and critical thinking skills to question existing inequities and help resolve social problems, through which genuine innovation begins.

5) In the absence of any formal assessment of the current GE curriculum (issued via CHED Memo. Order/CMO No. 20 series of 2014), no change or reframing in the GE curriculum should be allowed to push through.

Using existing data, it can be proven that the reduction of GE subjects in 2014 has somehow reduced the quality of education received by graduates. For example, in a 2025 public forum, CHED Chair Dr. Shirley Agrupis said that out of 25,000 graduates surveyed, only 3,000 landed jobs and “It’s not because they lack technical expertise in their field, but because they lack soft skills — writing ability, communication skills, and critical thinking.”

To state the obvious, GE subjects removed by CHED in 2014 (Filipino, English, Panitikan, Philippine Government & Constitution) and GE subjects that will be obliterated by RGECC (Readings in Philippine History, Contemporary World, Ethics, Science and Technology for Society, Understanding the Self etc.) are subjects that contribute much and are essential towards developing our students’ writing ability, communication skills, critical thinking skills, and mental health. Hence, RGECC will in fact further reduce whatever soft skills our students would learn from tertiary education.

6) Human intelligence and humanistic education, rather than Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology-centrism, should be emphasized in the GE. 

The proposed RGECC places excessive emphasis on AI and technology while failing to provide sufficient space for humanistic education, which should remain the core of GE. Given research findings indicating the cognitive and analytical drawbacks associated with the overuse of AI and digital technologies—particularly their impact on individuals’ capacity to think critically, creatively, and independently, as well as to comprehend, evaluate, and relate a vast range of reading materials to social realities—the current focus of the RGECC appears misguided.

Technology develops exponentially, but human wisdom develops through slow, lived experience. Hence, a GE program obsessed with AI is building its foundation on shifting sand. By the time a student masters the so-called “AI skills” of their freshman year, the technology has already changed by their senior year.  By abandoning the “perennials” (Ethics, History, Philosophy, Humanities, Social Sciences) for “technicals” (AI literacy), the university gives the student a degree that has a built-in expiration date.

The RGECC also reframes GE courses as subservient to technological development. By making students “functional” to the new technological environment, we lose sense of the concept of Bildung or the cultivation of the self. Under the proposed RGECC, GE courses will teach students how to calculate and compute and generate data from algorithms without understanding why and for what purpose. The so-called reframed GE now focuses on competency and technical mastery for economic productivity and efficiency of the market, which, given the now known unsustainability of relentlessly pursuing endless economic growth and market profitability, should not be the core of our GE. The RGECC’s purported philosophy is so impoverished that humanization and cultivation of holistic self are not even mentioned in the draft memorandum.

7) Merging content-rich subjects (such as Rizal’s Life and Works/Rizal and Philippine Studies) WON’T WORK. 

The RGECC intends to merge “Rizal and Philippine Studies.” This is a non-starter as these two subjects/fields are too content-rich to be merged. Such artificial merging will further dilute the teaching of such disciplines. Indeed, such flaw betrays the draft RGECC’s failure to take into account grounded experience, content expertise, and curricular training which caution against artificial merging of content-rich subjects and/or disciplines. The breadth and depth intended by Republic Act No. 1425 for the courses on Rizal’s Life, Works, and Writings will be impossible to fulfill if additional/separate subject matters will be merged with the current Rizal course.

8) Halving the GE subjects will worsen the quality of education in our country as the majority of our SHS students will enter college without the needed college readiness as reflected in their levels of proficiency as noted in recent NAT results.

The latest 2023 National Achievement Test (NAT) results cited by an EDCOM2 Report points out that only 1% of Grade 12 students are “highly proficient” and 25% are “proficient,” while a whopping 69% of students are “low proficient.” This clearly shows that most of the students will need broader and deeper GE in college to at least catch up with the skills and content that they were unable to master in senior high school. Such a gap will be bigger as the new SHS core subjects were further reduced recently as mentioned above.

9) The proposed GE was not the product of thoughtful, bottom-up discussions and deliberations which could have yielded a better curriculum that is genuinely responsive to our country's needs.

Usual processes for curricular review and development outlined in countless documents released by UNESCO (just to name a few examples) and generally accepted by academics especially by those trained in Curriculum Development, were not followed by the Technical Panel on GE (TPGE) that drafted the RGECC. Hence, their output must be discarded and stakeholders’ input, coupled with a formal assessment of the current curriculum should instead be the basis and springboard for crafting a better GE curriculum. 

10) The potential labor impact of halving the GE courses is huge—with the number of affected faculty members reaching 60,000 - 90,000 based on our computation—and our experience with the 2014 GE reduction shows that the government was unable, unwilling, and incapable of totally shielding teachers from displacement, load reduction, and de facto salary reduction (thru reduced loads or forced transfer to other levels of teaching). 

Half of the estimated 60,000 to 90,000 GE faculty members could be displaced or have their teaching loads drastically reduced. The simplified computation is based on the following assumptions: 4,792,160 college students; 36 units required GE under the current curriculum; subjects are taken in the first two years of college education; a typical college faculty member teaches 12 to 18 units per semester; each GE class can only have 40 students. 

This is on top of around 35,000 SHS teachers who will be displaced once the full impact of the reduced SHS core subjects is factored into the picture too. 

Without any comprehensive plan to ensure that no displacement will occur, the RGECC or any similar scheme should be rejected.

11) While the inclusion of Labor Education as a separate mandatory subject is laudable within the context of deteriorating working conditions in the Philippines and elsewhere, the current course description of RGECC’s Labor Education subject is too job-centric and still falls short of what genuine Labor Education (especially oriented towards unionization, strengthening of workers’ rights, and social justice) entails.

The RGECC shifts the focus from critical inquiry (questioning why labor is structured the way it is) to practical compliance (learning how to navigate existing labor laws and workplace norms). In the RGECC’s twisted version of “Labor Education,” you are being educated to fit into a slot, rather than to question the shape of the slot itself. 

12) The draft CHED memorandum on the RGECC is an example of over-regulation that stifles academic freedom, innovation, and creativity in the course offerings of HEIs. 

The said draft memorandum on the RGECC arbitrarily caps the units to just 18 units for most HEIs and to “ a maximum of thirty‑six (36) units” for autonomous HEIs. Such imposition of maximum units for GE violates the limits on CHED’s powers as set and clarified by the Supreme Court en banc decision on G.R. No. 216930, issued on October 09, 2018:  “...the CHED is authorized to determine the…general education distribution requirements…The provision further provides that this authority shall not be construed as limiting the academic freedom of universities and colleges. Therefore, HEIs are given the freedom to require additional” GE courses “to these minimum requirements if they wish to.” The imposition of a different maximum (one for most non-autonomous HEIs and another for autonomous ones) will only further widen the already existing gaps between what mainstream metrics label as high-tier and low-tier universities. Rather than lift all HEIs towards achieving quality education, the RGECC will thus pull many universities further down.

While it sounds like a win for “institutional autonomy,” making the number of GE units flexible based on the categorization of a university, it actually creates a fractured educational landscape. The move towards “flexible” GE requirements is the academic mirror of the so-called “Gig Economy” that shifts the philosophy of education from a stable, structural foundation to a “just-in-time” delivery system. Flexible GE structures often lead to the pruning of what market-worshipping bureaucrats consider as “low-utility” subjects (Philosophy, Literature, Humanities, Pure Math) in favor of “high-utility” vocational training. Such obsession creates fields of academic inequalities where some universities offer more GE units for well-rounded education, while others merely provide the bare minimum of 18 units to attract the financially challenged students who may want to graduate and then work as soon as possible. In this scenario, the “well-rounded” education becomes a luxury good, while the “bare minimum” becomes a survival tactic.

The imposition of “Compliance Monitoring and Review” and “Continuous Improvement Evidence and Review” mechanisms in the draft CHED memorandum on the RGECC stifles the academic freedom of HEIs and faculty members. By imposing very formalistic, bureaucratic, KPI-obsessed, and compliance-oriented regulations, HEIs will be unable to innovate and be creative in their course offerings.

In view of the aforementioned, our calls include:

• Stop tokenistic “consultations” on the proposed GE, conduct an assessment of the current one first!
• Reconstitute the Technical Panel on GE through a bottom-up process that ensures ample representation of HEIs and professional organizations towards more meaningful curriculum review and development!
• Do not over-regulate!
• Uphold academic freedom for innovation!
• Do not set a maximum number of units for GE!
• Let universities have more flexibility in designing their own GE!
• No to labor displacement!
• No to market-driven, job-centric GE!
• No to top-down curricular changes!
• Craft a GE that reflects the insights of stakeholders and responds to the needs of our communities!