Faculty groups reject CHED's proposed GE overhaul, warn of staff displacement

MANILA, Philippines — Faculty members told the Commission on Higher Education on Tuesday, May 5, that its proposed overhaul of the college general education curriculum will gut the humanities and leave several teachers at risk of losing their jobs with no government safety net in place.

The criticism came at a CHED public hearing on its draft curriculum that would cut mandatory GE to just 18 units — down from the current 36 — folding philosophy, ethics, literature and history into five broader skills-based courses. 

The proposed overhaul is the most sweeping change to the college GE program since 2013, when CHED last restructured the curriculum following the introduction of senior high school under K to 12. Critics said that reform already narrowed liberal education significantly and this new proposal would trim humanities classes even further.

CHED officials explained during the hearing that it is "reframing" the GE program to avoid subjecting students to the same classes they already took up in senior high school. 

Under the proposal, the 18 units include 15 units of core/mandated GE and three units of institutional GE. The five core GE courses would be Professional Communication, Global Trends and Emerging Technologies, Data Evidence and Ethics in a Knowledge Society, Rizal and Philippine Studies, and Labor Education. 

Standalone courses in philosophy, ethics, literature, art appreciation and Philippine history — classes in the current curriculum — do not appear as required subjects.

Faculty who shared their comments on the draft curriculum said the five core GE classes left no room for philosophy, ethics as a discipline, literature or the arts, and that folding those subjects into broader skills-based packages was tantamount to erasure.

Implementation of the new GE curriculum is being targeted for academic year 2027-2028. 

GE overhaul for 'market integration'

"Ethics is reduced to, what, a response to fake news and a tool for managing data?" University of Santo Tomas philosophy professor Paolo Bolaños said at the hearing. "That's what ethics is in the proposed GE?"

"There's emphasis on a market integration after graduation. But there seems to be this lack of understanding of the importance of content in teaching the general education courses," he added.

Bolaños, who said he was speaking on behalf of "the whole philosophical community in the Philippines," raised a second concern: CHED had drafted the curriculum without consulting the people who would teach it. The philosophy technical panel, he said, was never invited for talks.

"We who will be teaching and we who can provide you with the content — we have not been invited to discuss this matter with you," he said.  

CHED Technical Panel for General Education co-chair Jonathan Macayan said outcomes-based education does not sideline content, and that content experts from the relevant disciplines would be brought in to shape each course before the curriculum is finalized. 

"Content will always be there as the fundamental, the most basic, and it's in fact a very important component," he said.

'The effect is indistinguishable from removal'

University of the Philippines Los Baños professor Antonio Contreras told the hearing that CHED's insistence on the word "reframing" did not hold up against what the draft actually did. Requiring 16 of the 18 mandatory GE units through core courses, he said, left universities only a "token three-unit space for institutional identity."

"Call it reframing if you want," Contreras said. "But when institutions can no longer teach arts and social sciences on their own terms, the effect is indistinguishable from removal."

Silliman University College of Arts and Sciences dean Alana Leilani Narciso pressed a related point: neither literature nor philosophy appeared as mandated subjects in the new framework, meaning universities could choose not to offer them at all. 

She urged CHED to require at least one humanities course for all students rather than leave it to institutional discretion. CHED said the suggestion would be taken up in further deliberations.

CHED Executive Director Cinderella Filipina Benitez-Jaro defended the agency's authority to redesign the GE curriculum, citing Supreme Court ruling GR No. 216930. The high court, she said, had already upheld CHED's power to set GE distribution requirements when the 2013 curriculum was challenged in court on similar grounds.

Protecting teachers' employment

Victor Aguilan, convenor of the Council of Teachers and Staff of Colleges and Universities of the Philippines, told the commission that the draft had overlooked a specific legal obligation. 

The Philippine Education Act of 1982 (Batas Pambansa 232) requires CHED to involve the Department of Labor and Employment whenever curriculum changes affect teachers' employment.

This, Aguilan said, was absent from CHED's proposed GE overhaul.

"The issue is, how do you guarantee that no GE teachers would be displaced when this new reframing is fully implemented?" said Aguilan, a Silliman University professor. 

In private universities, teaching loads — and by extension job security — are tied directly to the number of units a subject carries.

CHED Technical Panel chair Edizon Fermin showed a slide mapping current GE faculty qualifications against the proposed new courses, saying all existing GE teachers, with the possible exception of art appreciation instructors, could be absorbed into the new framework with adequate retraining. 

Aguilan appeared unsatisfied with this response, and said: "Please do not transfer the burden to the higher education institution. That is our experience in K-12."

The draft, he noted, contained no funding provision for the retraining CHED was promising.

Aguilan also challenged the steps CHED has taken toward this major GE overhaul. He pointed out that the commission had already come up with a full draft proposal while simultaneously describing the process as a pilot test. 

But the results of a pilot, he argued, should be what drives policy, not the other way around.

"If this policy is already implemented and later we discover there are harmful effects, especially the displacement of teachers, then it would be too late," he said.

CHED said Tuesday it had already convened inter-agency meetings with other education agencies and legislative offices on the proposed changes, and committed to consulting all technical panels — including those not previously invited to the process — before the curriculum is finalized.

Faculty groups sound alarm ahead of hearing

The public hearing came days after several faculty members and groups expressed their opposition to the draft GE program. 

The Arts and Letters Faculty Association of the University of Santo Tomas, in a statement released Monday, called the draft a threat to the "soul of the university" and warned it would pursue legal action if CHED proceeded without addressing faculty concerns. 

"Our universities should not merely serve as factories for compliance and productivity," the group said.

Six Philippine Normal University (PNU) professors, writing for a news commentary for Philstar.com on Monday, warned that the framework would hurt most the students from under-resourced schools, who rely on college GE classes to deepen learning that uneven senior high school instruction left incomplete. 

The proposal, they argued, confused workforce preparation with education. 

"A graduate who can use technology but cannot ask what technology does to human dignity remains poorly educated," professors Allen Espinosa, Levi Elipane, Heidi Macahilig, Nikolee Marie Serafico-Reyes, Arlyne Marasigan and Leah Amor Cortez wrote.

The six PNU professors acknowledged that GE classes in its current form had problems — that some courses had become ceremonial, unevenly taught, or reduced to readings and compliance of students with course requirements. 

But those gaps, they wrote, pointed in one direction only.

"The answer to poorly taught Ethics, Rizal, History, Filipino, Communication, or Art Appreciation is not to remove or compress them," they wrote. "The answer is to teach them better."