Whose Philippines fits the curriculum?

The Commission on Higher Education has released a draft that promises a tighter, more responsive general education curriculum. On paper, it reads clean: 18 units, five required courses, one institutional space for context. It is the kind of order that appeals to policy. But education is rarely as neat as the documents that try to contain it.

To cut general education in half is to redraw the map of what a university considers worth knowing. What disappears is not just a set of courses, but a set of encounters. The slow work of meeting histories that are unfamiliar. The discomfort of recognizing that the nation has never been a single story. Under the draft, much of that burden is placed on one Philippine Studies course. Three units to hold together a country of more than 7,000 islands.

This kind of compression has its own implications. A nation compressed into a narrower framework would not make itself more understandable; rather, it would make itself silent in areas that should not be. Indigenous peoples (IPs) and Muslims in the regions of the Sulu Archipelago and Mindanao are no strangers to such silence. Silence was already familiar to us as our history only appears marginally in school. Their stories were considered folklore, their histories were marginal, and their knowledge system was seen separately from formal knowledge systems. The draft did not mention an aspect because it did not need to. That has been implied in the requirements and inclusions.

What is more troubling is how quickly this absence becomes normal. When a curriculum is repeatedly structured around a single national narrative, students begin to internalize that hierarchy as common sense. What is not required becomes what is not important. In this arrangement, knowledge from our communities is not actively rejected, but quietly displaced. It survives only when individual teachers have the time, training, or institutional support to include it. Otherwise, it fades into the background of “contextual material,” always optional, never foundational.

The proposal leans toward skills that travel easily across contexts. Communication. Data. Global trends. These matter. But a curriculum built around them risks imagining a student who exists nowhere in particular. A student without a language that anchors her. Without a community that shapes her sense of truth. Without a history that complicates what she is being taught. That kind of student does not exist. Real students arrive carrying stories, and those stories do not always find a place in the curriculum.

Here, Carol Gilligan gives us another perspective to consider this from. According to her, the models used in education systems tend to ignore the relational and context-specific aspects of understanding things, especially if those things derive from people’s experiences rather than abstract principles. If a curriculum emphasizes abstract over contextual knowledge, what implications are there for IPs and the Muslims in the Sulu Archipelago, where learning is inextricably connected to land, language, and culture?

There seems to be a tiny crack in the draft. Schools are left to define three topics themselves. It is called flexibility. Yet it turns out to be a negotiation–which history goes in and which one will have to wait till tomorrow? Is it dependent on there being someone who could teach it?

The place of José Rizal remains secure, as it should. But the question is not whether he is taught. It is whether he stands alone at the center, with others orbiting at the margins. For many students, the story of the nation does not begin or end with him. It includes long histories of resistance, of governance, of faith, of survival outside the frame of the colonial state. These are not alternative versions of the Philippines. They are part of its core.

A curriculum does more than organize subjects. It signals whose knowledge is taken seriously. When it narrows, it also chooses. It decides which voices are heard early, and which are deferred, and which may never be encountered at all.

A decision like this also shapes what students come to believe about knowledge itself. If only certain histories are treated as essential, then others are quietly marked as optional or expendable. Over time, this does not only affect what is taught, but what is imagined as worth knowing. This is how discrimination takes on a structural form rather than an overt one.

It is never too late to reflect upon the proposal. Certainly not out of any desire to prolong it needlessly, but because the draft must ultimately become more representative of the nation to which it speaks. An educational curriculum need not constrain students to conform to it; instead, it should be broad enough to enable students to know their identity, their place, and who is alongside them.

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Francis N. Reginio is an academic and social advocate specializing in policy analysis, human capital development, and community empowerment.