General Education is under attack from the Commission on Higher Education through its reframed GE proposal of 2026. First made public in a draft memorandum on April 16, 2026, the draft CHED Memorandum Order (CMO) on the Reframed General Education (GE) Curriculum [The Draft Policies, Standards, and Guidelines (PSG) for General Education Courses (2026)] represents the most aggressive, radical restructuring of college education in modern Philippine history along the neoliberal lines.
Thirteen years earlier, CHED fundamentally overhauled the country’s tertiary curriculum through CHED Memorandum Order (CMO) No. 20, Series of 2013, which laid down the Revised General Education Curriculum (RGEC). Before the reform, universities maintained robust GE programs ranging from 42 to 64 units, heavily populated by history, literature, philosophy, and language courses. The reframed curriculum slashed the core GE requirement to just 36 units. While CHED framed this move as a necessary modernization to align Philippine education with global standards (specifically the K-12 transition and ASEAN integration), its class character is crystal clear. It is a calculated, structural attack on critical thinking and national consciousness disguised as “student-centric modernization” and “global competitiveness.” One of the most heavily contested aspects of CMO 20-2013 was the removal of Filipino and Panitikan (Philippine Literature) as mandatory core subjects in the tertiary GE curriculum, relegating language teaching entirely to the K-12 basic education level.
Today the 2026 proposal seeks radically to slash the core General Education requirements down to a bare minimum, completely erasing familiar academic disciplines and replacing them with competency-based modules. The 50% Reduction (36 Units down to 18 Units) halves the mandatory minimum GE load in college from 36 units to just 18 units (comprising 6 specific courses). The proposal erases standalone liberal arts subjects such as Philosophy, Ethics, Art Appreciation, Literature, and Readings in Philippine History. The Proposed Reframed GE collapses content-based subjects to create 6 new competency-based courses:
• Professional Communication (re-engineered from Purposive Communication)
• Global Trends and Emerging Technologies (a combination of The Contemporary World and Science, Technology, & Society)
• Data, Evidence, and Ethics in a Knowledge-Driven Society
• Rizal and Philippine Studies (consolidating Philippine History and the legislated Rizal course)
• Labor Education (mandated by recent legislation)
• An Institutional Course (civic/community engagement)
Leisure Built on Labor: The Slave-Owning Foundations of Classical General Education
To understand the barbaric economism of the proposed reframed GE 2026 and how it retrogresses centuries back, we have to go back to the birth of liberal arts in ancient Greece. Before it was called “General Education,” Western universities relied on the Liberal Arts curriculum, which dated back to ancient Greece and Rome and was formalized in medieval European universities. This curriculum was split into the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy). For centuries, this was the standard education for the elite class. It was a fixed, rigid curriculum that every student took. There were no “majors” or “electives”—everyone read the same classical Greek and Latin texts.
Originally, the term “liberal arts” comes from the Latin artes liberales. Liber means “free.” Therefore, the liberal arts literally translate to “the skills or practices of the free person.” Liberal arts were invented by the ruling elite in slave-owning society. It was specifically designed for the despotes (masters) and epistates (slave-drivers). In the ancient Mediterranean, society was sharply divided between free citizens (the aristocracy) and those who performed physical labor (slaves, peasants, and artisans). The ruling classes believed that physical, manual, and vocational labor was degrading to the human mind. If you spent your day plowing fields, building walls, or accounting for a merchant, your mind was considered “shackled” to economic survival.
The Greeks used the word schole (the root of our word “school”), which literally meant leisure. Only those who possessed schole—meaning they did not have to work because slaves performed all their physical labor—had the time to study philosophy, geometry, and rhetoric. The liberal arts were designed precisely to occupy the leisure time of an independently wealthy ruling class. In Politics, specifically in Book VIII Aristotle argues, “But leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure. For he who is occupied has in view some end which he has not attained; but happiness is an end, since all men deem it to be accompanied with pleasure and not with pain…”
The Greek word schole for leisure is now the origin of the modern word school. The original Greek meaning of scholē was “leisure,” “rest,” or “free time” — specifically the kind of free time used for philosophical discussion and learning. For Aristotle, it was not idle laziness; it was the highest use of one’s time, free from the demands of work and necessity.
So, from the very beginning liberal arts and education was a monopoly of those who lived on the sweat and toils of slaves. In ancient Athens, scholē (leisure) was only possible for free male citizens. It was explicitly built on the labor of slaves, who did the physical and domestic work; women, who managed the household; non-citizen workers (banausoi), who did the trades and commerce.
Historians and philosophers have noted that the Western university tradition — which descends directly from Greek scholar — long remained a space for men of leisure and property. The idea that education is “above” practical work echoes that original class structure. The whole point was to train citizens for public life — politics, philosophy, oratory — not to make a living. Making a living was what slaves and tradespeople did. A gentleman who studied the liberal arts to get a job would have been considered embarrassing.
The Birth of GE and Industrial Capitalism: Standardizing the Mind for the Assembly Line
The birth of GE came when Columbia University created the Great Book program called Contemporary Civilization that became the foundational model for GE worldwide. It was the response of the bourgeoisie against the barbarism of Western civilization that led to World War 1. The inter-imperialist rivalry culminating in WW1 shocked the bourgeoisie who thought that Enlightenment ideals would lead to a more peaceful, humane and egalitarian society.
At the same time, the bourgeoisie faced a massive crisis of legitimacy after WWI. Not only had their civilized illusion collapsed, but the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had just occurred, proving to the global working class that a viable, revolutionary alternative to capitalism existed. By forcing students to read these texts, the university re-framed the horrors of the modern world not as a structural failure of capitalism, but as a temporary, moral deviation from Western ideals. So, they created “Core Curriculum” that would train workers in liberal arts not just as skilled workers.
By injecting a heavy dose of liberal arts into their technical training, the Columbia model sought to create a loyal, domesticated intelligentsia. It taught the technical workforce to internalize bourgeois ethics, value “civility,” and believe that the existing liberal-democratic state was the highest peak of human reason.
The great paradox of bourgeois GE humanism is by defending the Western tradition as the solution, it ended up defending the civilization that had produced both the philistinism it hated and the imperialism it ignored. It was a refined, humanistic bourgeois response — more sophisticated than simple nationalism or crude capitalism — but bourgeois nonetheless in its fundamental assumptions about whose civilization mattered, whose questions counted, and whose labor made the whole thing possible.
Columbia 1918 “Core Curriculum” GE was counterposed to President Eliot of Harvard (1869) who introduced electives to inherited rigid system of classical liberal arts. While Harvard GE reform created professionals, the Columbia program aimed for shared understanding to address the perennial issues of bourgeois capitalism.
What Harvard’s reform produced was the professional-managerial class — people with deep specialized expertise in a particular domain, credentialed by a prestigious institution, equipped to manage the technical and administrative complexity of industrial capitalism. The professional-managerial class Harvard President Eliot was producing could run capitalism’s institutions. But capitalism also needed something else — it needed ideological coherence, a shared framework of values, concepts, and narratives that could hold liberal democratic capitalist society together against both internal fragmentation and external challenge. This is precisely what Contemporary Civilization of Columbia provided. It was not training specialists — it was forming citizens who shared a common intellectual and moral framework within which the perennial questions of bourgeois society could be asked and answered.
Today, while Western universities are busy mourning the death of the “soul” of their institutions—framing the decline of the humanities as a return to cultural philistinism (the narrow-minded ignorance of arts and letters)—the Philippine academe faces a much more predatory, materialist beast. In the Philippines, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and university administrations are not merely neglecting the liberal arts; they have actively hijacked and weaponized General Education to serve the dictates of global finance capital.
In the face of this shamefaced barbarization of education under CHED educators must insist that we cannot fight CHED’s 2026 proposal by simply romanticizing the old Columbia model or begging for a return to Vicente Sinco’s 1960 liberal arts curriculum. To fight a crass neoliberal web, we cannot use the worn-out bourgeois humanism. The only antidote to this hyper-marketized, corporate chokehold is a militant, unapologetic mass movement that demands an education designed for national industrialization and genuine national liberation—not the global corporate boardroom.
The fight against the 2026 Reframed GE is not a conservative battle to save the humanities from philistines. It is a radical opportunity to unmask the state, build a broad united front among displaced educators and exploited students, and advance the struggle for a truly National, Scientific, and Mass-Oriented education.
The Trap of Liberal Education: Outsourcing from the Brightest of the Working Class
From the national democratic perspective, defending the liberal arts tradition and its democratizing ideals in GE is tantamount to defending the class structure of semi-colonial and semi-feudal system of Philippine society. No matter how liberal arts and GE defend themselves as promoting progressive ideas and “open mindedness”, tolerance, and reason, it falls short of questioning the very basis of liberalism as the formal and official philosophy of universities.
Liberal education therefore plucks the brightest minds from the working class and rearranges their brains to think like the bourgeois CEOs. Instead of returning to their communities to lead a revolution, these educated youth are absorbed into the corporate machinery, the state bureaucracy, or the global labor market (OFW phenomenon)—leaving the semi-colonial, semi-feudal structure completely intact.
In a traditional GE setting, “open-mindedness” is taught as the ultimate intellectual virtue. Students are told to listen to all sides, weigh the pros and cons of capitalism versus socialism, and avoid “extreme” positions. This forced neutrality is a conservative trap. If a system is inherently exploitative (where landlessness is rampant and workers are exploited), demanding that a student remain “open-minded” or “objective” is tantamount to asking them to tolerate oppression. By transforming systemic violence into an abstract classroom debate, the liberal arts neutralize righteous anger and prevent students from committing to a decisive, revolutionary standpoint. Worse, it teaches civility that suppresses “righteous anger” in the name of civilized dialogue and ethical detachment. The student is told to “calm down,” “stick to the data,” or “avoid emotional rhetoric.” This framework treats anger as a sign of irrationality. In reality, when dealing with systemic violence (like poverty, exploitation, and extrajudicial killings), anger is the only rational response. Forcing a student to speak about human suffering in the cold, detached language of policy papers is a form of academic violence that strips the issue of its moral urgency.
“Tolerance” in a liberal university simply means tolerating the dominant capitalist ideology while allowing radical ideas to exist only as harmless academic counter-points that never translate into actual material change. What liberalism calls “Reason,” the national democratic perspective views as the logic of the ruling class. For example, liberal reason dictates that if you want change, you should write a petition to your representatives in the legislative department, lobby congress, or vote in the next election. Anyone who advocates extra-legal recourses, are tolerated in the academe in the name of academic freedom but will have to be answerable to the state outside the walls of universities. Inside the campus, extra-legal theories are treated as fascinating intellectual exercises. You can write a 50-page thesis defending the New People’s Army (NPA) or historical materialism, and you might even win an academic award for it. By socializing students to view “extra-legal” methods as inherently dangerous, illegitimate, or a last resort, the university primes them to accept the legitimacy of the oppressor’s legal system. It tricks students into playing a game where the rules are rigged against the masses from the very start. Defending liberal “reason” over revolutionary action effectively outlaws the only tool the oppressed masses actually have to liberate themselves: armed struggle and mass mobilization.
The Liberal Ideology as the Default Universal Standard
By framing liberalism as the “default” or “common sense” philosophy of the university, the liberal arts tradition successfully masquerades as a progressive force while performing a profoundly conservative function: ensuring that the foundational structures of Philippine society are never truly shaken. By allowing students to be “wild in their imagination,” the university gives them the comforting illusion that they are free, progressive, and rebellious. But by ensuring they are tamed in their actuations, it guarantees that the actual material structures of oppression—the landlessness of the Filipino peasant, the exploitation of the workers, and the hegemony of US empire—will never face an actual threat from the people inside the ivory tower.
As Lenin argued in State and Revolution the bourgeois humanists love to talk about “democracy in general” or “pure freedom.” He insisted on always asking a concrete, materialist question: “Freedom for which class? Democracy for whom?” Lenin famously asserted that even the most progressive, democratic, and humanist republic is nothing more than a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Its polished institutions—parliaments, courts, and human rights charters—are just civilized machinery designed to suppress the working class. When the working class threatens the profits of the elite, the humanist mask is instantly dropped, and the state unleashes raw, fascist military and police violence to protect capital.
From Bogus Universalism of Bourgeois Humanism to National Democratic Pedagogy
Hence a fully revolutionary GE that espouses nationalist, scientific and mass-oriented education is the only way to sublate the inadequacy and false universalism of bourgeois liberal arts and GE. A national, scientific, and mass-oriented (NSMO) General Education program does not simply discard the liberal arts; it sublates them. It negates its bourgeois, reactionary, and false-universalist core, preserves its progressive elements (like empirical rigor, logic, and creative expression), and elevates them to a higher, revolutionary plane that actively serves the liberation of the exploited masses. This education supplants the bourgeois democratic education towards a national democratic character with socialist perspective. It means the kind of education we must promote is anti-imperialist that rejects the subjectivism and idealist philosophies dominant in the academe specifically postmodernism, post-Marxism, and poststructuralism. It aims at creating a broad united front among educators, scientists, inventors, experts, artists to combat conservatism and push for national industrialization. It explicitly analyzes how foreign enterprises plunder local resources and suppress domestic industry. Instead of training students to be highly polished cogs for the global labor market, it hones the students’ minds to struggle for genuine economic, cultural, and political sovereignty.
A mass-oriented GE completely smashes the ivory tower. It redefines the “human” not as the isolated, property-owning bourgeois individual (of Western capitalist Enlightenment), but as the collective working masses (the proletariat and the peasantry).
CHED’s 2026 market-driven attack on General Education proves that our semicolonial state is no longer interested in maintaining even the illusion of liberal humanism. It wants pure corporate standardization without apologies.
Therefore, defending the old liberal arts tradition is a dead end—it is a nostalgic defense of a system that was always designed to domesticate the spirit of the working class for super profit extraction. The only viable path forward is a radical leap. A fully revolutionary, NSMO General Education is the definitive historical answer: it seizes the tools of knowledge from the ruling class, unmasks their hypocritical peace, and hands them to the people as instruments of total societal transformation.
Prospects for Change
A Nationalist, Scientific, and Mass-Oriented education has always been advocated by progressive educators and militant student movements as the systemic antidote to the country’s current Commercialized, Colonial, and Fascist Education (CCFE) system. This program has been practiced by radical educators in schools throughout the country since the First Quarter Storm. Its roots however go back to the anti-colonial/anti-American struggle of early Filipino intellectuals and revolutionary forces.
Before they were systematically targeted and forcibly shut down by state militarization, the Lumad schools served as the most concrete, real-world application of the NSMO framework in Philippine history. The state’s violent crackdown on these schools—labeling them as “breeding grounds for rebels” and shutting them down—proves that the wholesale adoption of NSMO cannot coexist with the current system. The Lumad schools were a glimpse of a liberated future. Thus, the system crushed them because the US-puppet regime of Duterte cannot tolerate an educated, self-sufficient, and un-miseducated indigenous populace.
To expect the current state to adopt a wholesale NSMO framework is to ask the bureaucrat capitalists, big landlords, and export-dependent oligarchy to fund its own ideological suicide. It is structurally impossible to implement NSMO education without overturning our current system. What we can do now as educators is to expand and strengthen our united front and alliances with other educators, academic groups, progressive education unions and patriotic school administrators to frustrate the aggressive neoliberal attacks on education. More importantly, we must practice the revolutionary pedagogy, maximize the spaces of General Education to teach history, philosophy, political economy, language, culture and the arts, natural science and mathematics from the point of view of the toiling masses and for the advancement of their struggle for genuine national liberation and democracy.
