Lipstick on a Pig: The Demerits of Mass “General Education”

The recent uproar over CHED’s plan to reduce the number of general education subjects has led many to reflect on the place of the humanities in the standard higher education curriculum. Some commentators have expressed concern over the further “dehumanization” of education or the “watering-down” of the humanities that would supposedly take place after the elimination of G.E. subjects from the general curriculum. 

Such concerns, however, miss the point. While CHED’s plan to gut the GE curriculum is bad, it is bad because the government shouldn’t be dipping its hands into university affairs in the first place. This inevitably means that there shouldn’t be a bureaucratically supervised GE — or even a CHED — in the first place. But I digress. 

The reason I say that concerns over the “dehumanization” of education or the “watering down” of the humanities miss the point is because the very inclusion of humanities subjects in a mass, impersonal, and bureaucratic educational system that is at its core a labor-transaction already does enough to water-down the humanities. 

To begin with, the humanities presupposed personal tutoring—similar to what Aristotle did for Alexander—or long-term, peripatetic formation as was done in the Athenian Lyceum. This is not something that is replicated in the modern university environment, where students are processed in batches with very little in the way of personal formation—something not helped by the fact that the modular format of education forces a surface-level understanding of multiple texts under relatively high time pressure. 

This is already a problem for those who actually take up humanities subjects as their college major. But to mandate humanities subjects for all universities regardless of institutional capacity leads (and has led) to further strain being put on humanities departments. As a result, it often happens that humanities subjects are taught by inexperienced fresh graduates who, in many instances, are just as clueless as their students about life and the human condition.

Furthermore, given that many higher education institutions are in the business of catering to the lowest common intellectual denominator, the substance of the humanities itself often ends up diluted into a series of vapid platitudes and word salads, thus destroying the very purpose of a humanities education, i.e., to instill a systematic, deep and universal understanding of the human condition. “A little learning,” as Pope says, “is a dangerous thing.”

This is especially true when it comes to the teaching of history and Rizal. History (no pun intended) shows that the teaching of Philippine history is more often than not another means of reinforcing tired, black-legend nationalist narratives which also serve an added function: to provide a coherent ideological framework for the continued existence of the bureaucratic leviathan. If there is one thing I agree with postmodernists on, it is this: historical discourses are not neutral.

My own university has done an above-average job at mitigating these drawbacks, but it still has its shortcomings. What more for other higher education institutions in the Philippines, which do not enjoy the luxury of a coherent conceptual tradition or a faculty prepared to hand it down? To impose by means of the State a humanistic curriculum upon people prepared neither to receive nor transmit it is a sure way to emasculate a once-living tradition.

My final remarks: one does not develop taste nor substantial ethical sensitivity in school; even seminaries struggle to achieve this. The development of a well-formed aesthetic and moral sensitivity in a person depends more on his or her family, peers, mentors and—most importantly—life experience than twenty-something units of boring lectures given by underpaid, caffeine-dependent instructors. 

If we really care about critical thinking, we should at least go back to teaching the liberal arts as it was meant to be taught: the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, music and geometry). These liberal arts are the foundation of any fruitful intellectual inquiry. Otherwise, we would be doing the humanities a greater disservice by retaining its mandatory implementation in colleges and universities nationwide.