The mandate of CHED is not merely to streamline college education into a shorter, more “efficient” pipeline toward employment. Under the Higher Education Act of 1994, it is also tasked to promote quality education, uphold academic freedom, and ensure that higher learning remains responsive not only to labor demands, but to nation-building itself.

That is precisely where the growing discomfort over CHED’s proposed “Reframed General Education” curriculum comes in.

CHED argues that reducing GE units from 36 to as low as 18 is part of a continuing reform aligned with K-to-12, supposedly eliminating redundancies and producing graduates more attuned to present-day industry realities. On paper, that sounds practical enough. Modern, even.

But universities are not assembly lines for labor production alone.

The strong objections coming from institutions like Ateneo de Manila and the University of Santo Tomas reveal a deeper fear: that in trying too hard to create employment-ready graduates, we may end up hollowing out the very soul of university education itself.

Because once philosophy, literature, history, ethics, and the humanities are compressed into vague multidisciplinary “competencies,” what exactly are we still calling higher education?

As a Thomasian — once a student and once a faculty member — I feel something deeply important risks getting lost in the process. And I say this not only as a journalist of over four decades, but as a former college teacher who understands what happens inside classrooms beyond competencies and course matrices.

Long before I wrote columns and covered stories, I was once a young Arts and Letters student in UST whose worldview was shaped not by technical training, but by General Education subjects that shaped my decision to pick my major in the 3rd year.

Rizal. Philosophy. Contemporary World Geography. History. These subjects did not merely help me pass exams, but taught me how to think, contextualize, discern, and question. They cultivated intellectual curiosity and moral responsibility — qualities essential in journalism, especially in an age drowning in misinformation, manufactured outrage, and shallow discourse.

That is why the proposed reframing of GE is alarming. It dares to treat liberal arts subjects as expendable “redundancies,” as though learning is a one-time transaction instead of a layered and maturing process. A philosophy discussion in college is vastly different from one in Senior High School because students themselves evolve in depth, perspective, and understanding.

Then there are the educators themselves — historians, philosophers, literature professors, social scientists — many of whom dedicated their lives not for wealth, but for scholarship and the preservation of thought. Once you reduce their disciplines into compressed modules or vague competencies, the result is hardly reform, but rather a step closer to intellectual poverty.

A nation that weakens the humanities may still produce employable graduates, of course. But it risks producing citizens who know how to work, yet no longer fully know how to think.

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