General education or just general training?
The Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) released a draft memo on a “reframed” general education (GE), proposing to reduce units to 18 or six core GE subjects. This continues their pattern of reducing GE subjects by half, as we were originally required to take roughly 63 units of GE subjects prior to K-12, which was then reduced to 36 units. To achieve such successive reductions, CHEd further merged disciplines to come up with five mandated subjects: (1) professional communication, (2) global trends and emerging technology, (3) data, evidence, and ethics in a knowledge society, (4) Rizal and Philippine studies, and (5) labor education. (They have generously allowed one more GE slot for institutions to design on their own.) We have seen this strategy before with K-12. Under the guise of “integration” and “multidisciplinarity,” what ends up is more of a “mix-redux”: combining subjects while removing as many elements as possible to make them fit.
A touted rationale is the need to adapt to the global market and ensure that our graduates are workforce-ready. They hide behind the Outcomes-Based Education framework, insisting that all they want is to make sure that education is linked to outcomes. But what exact outcomes are we aiming for? There seems to be an assumption that education is simply preparation for work, as if it were one long onboarding into a job that has yet to begin.
It begs the question: Are we educating or are we training?
Education is more than just acquiring technical knowledge and skills. It concerns itself with the formation of a person: how they think, what they value, and how they understand themselves and others. More than just shaping future workers, we should be concerned with forming future Filipinos.
Expanding outcomes beyond work, we can aim to have mentally healthy Filipinos. The World Health Organization defines mental health as “a state of well-being in which an individual realizes their own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to contribute to their community.” Mental health and well-being are not just about emotions—it involves a set of capacities that we continuously develop.
What promotes well-being? First, the capacity for self-awareness and reflexivity. We need to understand our inner experience—listen to ourselves—so that we can figure out what we need. Too often, people who are not attuned to themselves end up engaging in things that don’t serve them, causing burnout.
Philosophy does well in mastering such capacities, for example. Art and humanities can also help us develop a keen sense of experience—the capacity to sit with contradiction, ambivalence, and ambiguity, which will help us when we are faced with uncertainty.
It is also important for us to develop critical and contextual thinking. This is what makes us active agents in our lives rather than merely being compliant workers. Only when these capacities are developed can we truly make informed decisions. We can decide whether the rules make sense. We can spot misinformation and deception if we are able to think for ourselves. We would be less likely to allow corruption to remain rampant. Developing critical and contextual thinking cannot be taught via lectures. It can only be facilitated through exposure to diverse perspectives. History provides this perspective through the past. The arts provide this perspective through imagination. Philosophy and social sciences provide us with lenses to see our experience in its many forms. After all, how can we come up with new solutions for our nation’s ills if the current system is all we know?
Emotion regulation is key to good mental health and well-being. We panic and get distressed when we don’t have a good grasp of what is happening and fail to see a way out of an upsetting situation. Well-being, then, involves the capacity to understand causes that allow us to respond and not just react. This requires the ability to pause and think things through. We need to be able to step back and see the bigger picture and see the underlying forces in play. The global market pushes us to go faster and keep up. To make life sustainable—and enjoyable—what we really need to do is to master the art of slowing down.
While policymakers seem to want to push students out of the gate as fast as possible, thinking that reducing GE units will help graduate them faster, they fail to appreciate that university life may be the last chance for students to breathe and pause. It is in higher learning that students can fully focus on developing their humanity before taking on the pressures of the labor economy. We have forgotten the value of a well-rounded education, where general education serves as the bedrock.
If we want mentally healthy Filipinos, we need to see students as more than just future workers.
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aatuazon@up.edu.ph
