CHED, Oh CHED, Why Do You Persecute Me?

IMAGE: Patrick Roque, “Commission on Higher Education in UP Diliman Campus, Quezon City.”

Years ago during my college days, I remember hearing countless complaints about those pesky General Education units. Students groaned at the sight of Philosophy, Rizal, Art Appreciation, Theology, Literature, and endless readings that seemed painfully unrelated to their future professions.

“Why do engineers need Rizal?”

“Why should future accountants study poetry?”

“What is the point of studying art when I just want to graduate?”

At first, I understood the frustration. College students carry enough burdens already: deadlines, examinations, financial pressure, sleepless nights, and the constant anxiety of surviving adulthood. To many students, GE subjects appeared to be unnecessary obstacles standing between them and the diploma they desperately sought.

Yet as years passed, I began to wonder: why do we hate the very subjects that attempt to make us more human?

General Education is not merely academic decoration. It exists because technical knowledge alone is insufficient in building a functioning society. A teacher without empathy, a politician without historical understanding, an engineer without ethics, or a scientist incapable of communicating truthfully to society may all be competent professionals, yet remain dangerous in their own ways.

The sciences teach us how to build.

The humanities teach us why we build.

GE subjects expose students to history, philosophy, ethics, literature, religion, and the arts because society does not merely need workers. Society needs reflective, thinking human beings capable of discernment, compassion, and moral responsibility.

As an educator myself, I have seen how students often prioritize subjects they perceive as “practical” while dismissing the humanities as irrelevant filler. Many ask only one question: “Will this help me get a job?” It is an understandable concern in an economy where survival itself feels like a competition. Yet education was never meant to produce human machines programmed solely for employment.

A nation may produce thousands of skilled graduates, but if those graduates cannot think critically, understand history, communicate ethically, or empathize with fellow citizens, then education has failed in its deeper purpose.

Ironically, many lessons from GE only become meaningful after graduation. We laugh at Philosophy until life forces us to confront suffering, morality, and purpose. We dismiss Literature until grief, heartbreak, or loneliness makes us search for words that articulate the human condition. We ignore History until we witness society repeating the same mistakes generation after generation.

Perhaps youth naturally mistakes utility for value. Students often seek what is immediately profitable, measurable, or applicable. Yet the most important lessons in life are rarely appreciated in the moment they are taught.

And in an age increasingly shaped by automation and artificial intelligence, the importance of General Education becomes even clearer. Machines may eventually calculate faster, write better reports, generate data, and even imitate creativity. But empathy, ethical judgment, wisdom, spirituality, historical consciousness, and genuine human reflection remain profoundly human responsibilities.

Ironically, the more advanced technology becomes, the more humanity itself becomes valuable.

This is why disciplines like Philosophy, History, and Literature matter. Philosophy teaches us how to question. History teaches us how societies rise and fall. Literature teaches us how to understand lives beyond our own. Art reminds us beauty exists even in suffering. Theology and ethics force us to wrestle with morality, meaning, and responsibility.

Without these fields, education risks becoming mere industrial training.

Perhaps that is the true tension behind GE subjects. Students see additional requirements; educators see attempts at human formation. Students see inconvenience; institutions see civic responsibility.

Of course, not every GE subject is taught perfectly. Some classes become overly theoretical, disconnected from reality, or reduced to memorization exercises that kill genuine curiosity. This criticism is valid. But the failure of execution does not erase the importance of the idea itself.

Strange, is it not? We live in an era drowning in misinformation, historical revisionism, and manufactured narratives, yet the humanities and historical disciplines are often the first deemed “excessive” or “impractical.” Perhaps the problem is not that these subjects lack value, but that their value cannot be immediately monetized.

Ironically, at a time when historical distortion, cultural amnesia, and public misinformation continue to spread, discussions surrounding Commission on Higher Education proposals to merge or restructure Rizal and History courses raise deeper questions about the direction of education itself. Curriculum streamlining may pursue efficiency, but one cannot help but wonder what is sacrificed when historical and national consciousness are compressed fore convenience.

José Rizal was never meant to be a mere historical figure memorized for examinations. Rizal represents critical thought, civic responsibility, nationalism, and the courage to confront societal illness through ideas rather than violence. To reduce the study of Rizal and History into mere academic consolidation risks unintentionally weakening the reflective spaces where students wrestle with identity, citizenship, and national memory.

A society that slowly abandons historical reflection may eventually produce graduates skilled in labor yet detached from nationhood, culture, and civic responsibility.

The danger of reducing education into pure utility is simple: we may succeed in producing efficient professionals while failing to produce thoughtful citizens. And a nation can survive incompetent workers longer than it can survive a people who no longer remember who they are.

Maybe the tragedy of General Education is not that students hate it, but that its value is often realized too late.

Years after graduation, many eventually discover that the subjects they once complained about were the same subjects that taught them how to think, reflect, argue, empathize, and remain human in an increasingly mechanical world.

And maybe CHED was not persecuting us after all.

Maybe it was desperately trying to save us from becoming educated machines.

For the purpose of education is not merely to produce employable graduates, but citizens capable of thinking, questioning, remembering, and remaining human.

Xelestine Gabriel Payte is a part-time faculty member of the University of Asia and the Pacific.