Tag Archives: general education

Qwertyman No. 197: Cultural Lobotomy

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, May 11, 2026

OUR FRIEND Toym Imao, among our most talented and productive sculptors, also serves as dean of the UP College of Fine Arts where my wife Beng teaches art conservation. Lately, like many academic administrators, Toym’s been feeling embattled because of the lack of resources given to his college, whose buildings may look new and good on the outside but whose roofs leak, among other ailments and deficiencies. (At least they have a building; my home College of Arts and Letters is still a vagrant in Diliman, more than ten years after the Faculty Center burned down.) Beng—who envisions the creation of a formal art conservation program and center in UP to serve the country’s longstanding needs in this area—sometimes has to teach in the garage of our campus home for lack of table space in their department. 

Let me quote a few salient lines from Toym’s self-described “rant,” which he published online:

“When students are treated as customers (rather than our future), when education becomes a service (than a mission), and when institutions are driven by metrics, compliance, and efficiency, we lose something essential.

“We lose the art school as a space of imagination. As a space of critique and discourse. As a space where we form not just skills, but ways of thinking. A space of engagement and confrontation. A space to take risks and make mistakes in a nurturing environment.

“An art school is not a diploma factory, it is a well of souls, it is a spirit house. If we lose these purposes, we do not just weaken education. We weaken our culture, we lose our spirit as a nation.”

But now Toym & Co. are up against an even bigger enemy, beyond leaking roofs and bureaucratic indifference: a government-sponsored initiative to gut the humanities and to bleed it out of the college curriculum so young Filipinos could enter the workforce sooner. 

The comeuppance of certain pseudo-journalists aside, no issue stood out in our FB feeds over this past week as much as the widespread outrage over the Commission on Higher Education’s proposed “Reframed General Education” program, cutting required GE units from 36 down to 18. They’ll do this by shoehorning the old (and already much-compressed) arts and humanities courses into such brainy-sounding but essentially hollow subjects as “Data, Evidence, and Ethics in a Knowledge Society” (which sounds to me like a puffed-up way of saying “Don’t use AI to plagiarize and write your homework,” which I’ll bet is how it’s going to be taught).

It isn’t hard to imagine how this act of cultural lobotomy came about: the CHED people were given marching orders from the start to find a way of cramming some GE subjects into a three-year curriculum. Never mind what kind of chop suey recipe they would come up with—like mixing a smattering of Philippine history into a sludge of Rizal; just fit everything in three years, and all will be well. 

I’m not even going to discuss in detail how and why the CHED proposal is such a sad, silly, an even stupid solution to a problem that, to begin with, is ill-defined. You can look up the analyses of people more attuned to the theory of education than I am—aside from Toym Imao, experts like Profs. Antonio P. Contreras, Mark Joseph Calano, and Jose Wendell Capili have already written extensively about this, and about the necessity of the humanities in our formation as humans and citizens. 

I will, however, raise a few points and questions for further thought:

Is the problem employability, of not teaching our young the skills our workplaces require? Are the arts and humanities–including language and history—therefore excess baggage that workers don’t need to do their jobs well?

General education isn’t about creating unemployable artists. It’s about helping ordinary people think like artists do—creatively, intuitively, critically, out of the box, to find better viewpoints and solutions than numbers alone can provide. And speaking of unemployed artists, why not build up and support creative industries like South Korea and other countries do, to channel our natural abilities in design, performance, and expression into globally competitive endeavors?

And who and where are the synoptic geniuses who are going to teach these massively integrated courses? Instructors who have a hard time teaching even basic English, and whose own grasp of history and philosophy is tenuous at best?

There’s a lot of the “digital” in the “reframed” GE program, a nod to the pervasiveness of the Internet and AI in education. But the real challenge is not how to detect and use AI, but to be naturally intelligent: to think and reason for yourself without reaching for your phone.

Bad education isn’t going to fix a bad economy and bad governance. But a good education that teaches young people the difference between right and wrong and between good and bad—and only the humanities can do that—will help them elect good leaders who can then make the best decisions for our economic well-being. 

“We have to do something!” cried Beng, as always the more ardent activist between the two of us. “Let’s rally in front of CHED. Let’s show them how strongly we feel about this issue!”

Of course I’ll go march with Beng wherever she goes, but I suspect that in this day and age, rallies don’t work as well as they used to. You’ll shout yourselves hoarse telling your co-marchers things they already know, while the people inside the office go about making coffee and sharing BTS chismis. You might get on the evening news, in between a mugging and a fashion piece.

You have to find the people who can actually change policy, and exert pressure there. They’re in Congress and the Senate, which controls the pursestrings and can make state university presidents and agency heads mumble like marionettes at budget hearings.

The trouble is, even people you’d expect to know better don’t seem to know any better. Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate Basic Education  Committee while co-chairing the influential Edcom 2, is behind the push to cut college down to three years. His proposed Senate Bill 51 aiming for just that is the wind behind the CHED technical committee’s wings. That leaves us with Higher Education Committee Chair Loren Legarda, a staunch champion of the arts and culture, to bear the burden of our arguments in the arena where it matters.

She’ll have a lot of championing to do, against the likes of Sen. Robinhood Padilla, (mind you, the one in charge of constitutional amendments) who has opined that the job of opposition senators is, well, to oppose anything and everything. Indeed, the fact that we have people like him in the Senate is the best argument for a strong GE program—not just to educate them, but to make sure young Filipinos don’t vote donkeys (I’m using the kinder term here) into the Senate ever again.

Just thinking about it makes me want to put on my marching shoes, and I don’t care if Beng and I end up shouting into the wind. 

Penman No. 222: An Education for the Well-Rounded Filipino

Posted on by
Reply

1094625733_b065e8bc1c_z

Penman for Monday, October 24, 2016

 

IN A few weeks’ time, several hundred professors at the University of the Philippines’ Diliman campus will gather together for an important vote on UP Diliman’s General Education program—long seen to be the hallmark of a UP education. It’s important because what happens there will determine, to a great extent, what “tatak UP” will mean for the next generation or two, and what being “the national university,” as its charter defines it, entails as far as the quality and the breadth of its offerings are concerned.

The raging battle seems to be over how many units (or class-hours a week) to allot to General Education subjects, which have traditionally covered basic and compulsory courses in such areas as language (English and Filipino), history, math, science, and philosophy.

There’s a menu of options on the table, ranging from a formidable 45 units to a scant 21, and an emerging compromise of 30-36 units in between; the mix of courses in these totals is also under negotiation. Those who want more want to ensure that every UP undergraduate—whether he or she plans to become a lawyer, an engineer, a surgeon, or a painter—can talk intelligently as a well-rounded citizen about the Katipunan and mitosis and perspective and Sophocles and interstellar travel. Those who prefer less want students to graduate from their programs sooner, for UP to remain competitive with other schools, and suggest that students can imbibe some GE skills both from their K-12 add-ons and from their higher-level classes.

I don’t mind saying that I put myself squarely on the 30+ side. We can’t keep complaining that young Filipinos can’t write or speak in proper sentences or don’t know who Apolinario Mabini was—without doing enough to fix the problem, given the chance. Sure, some of these learning points can be addressed in senior high; but subjects like History, English, and Philosophy will still be different when taught in UP’s staunchly secular context and pitched as adult concerns.

But never mind me—let’s give a listen to one of our most accomplished writers, the Leyte-born but now New York-based Gina Apostol, whose novels have won the 2013 PEN America/Open Book Award and National Book Awards in the Philippines. Some time ago, Gina wrote UP Diliman Chancellor Michael Tan to plead for the strengthening of UP’s GE program, and I got her permission to quote from that letter here:

I am writing as a graduate of the UP English department, 1980-1984, a former teacher at the department, and as a novelist whose work has been indelibly shaped by my education at UP—in particular, by its General Education program, to which I look back daily in my own work as a teacher and a writer.

My three published novels owe their genesis to that program. My current novel, William McKinley’s World, about the Philippine American War, began in a PI 101 class in a classroom at Palma Hall Annex, where my professor taught me about a war I never knew about.

In those first two years at UP, I learned to think. The General Education program made me into a writer. I went to a private high school in Leyte that certainly taught me well (arguably just as rounded as the current K-12 program); but I needed the General Education program at UP to make me whole—a critical consumer, a nationalist thinker, a global reader, and finally, it gave me ground to think honestly and seriously about what education means, it gave breadth of thought to allow me to become who I am—a novelist whose work is absolutely grounded in the questions that UP had asked of me in my first two years at the school.

It is my misfortune (though some call it luck) that I have ended up teaching in the States, living among an extremely lucky group of students: the wealthy enclave of Manhattan’s private schools. But every day, teaching my very privileged, very wealthy students who can enroll in any school they want, I can compare what they have to my education at Diliman, and I am daily impressed by the foundational, long view of knowledge grounded in the breadth of UP’s General Education curriculum.

My experience as an educator and an artist here in America is that the education I gained at the University of the Philippines is equal to and (given the state of America) too often exceeds the quality of education abroad. This is true of my fellow alumni who come to America: we understand how well we were prepared.

I cannot underline this enough: I know that UP provided me with an incalculable, a priceless education. I am writing to state emphatically that the General Education program at UP should be enriched, not reduced.

Even today, having been to and taught at several schools considered the best of their kind in America—so acculturated and mired in the world of the privileged as I am here in America—every day, in my classroom, I still marvel at the amazing comprehensive education I got at the University of the Philippines.

Here in Manhattan, these kids are killing themselves to get into colleges with the kind of education I got at UP. My own daughter went to the University of Chicago, and I will say that I was proud (and fascinated) to know my education as a freshman and sophomore was equal to her own rigorous coursework in the General Education program of the University of Chicago, where highly able freshmen have to go through the GE program. As you know, Chicago’s program still stands as a beacon of higher education in America today.

At UP, as my daughter was at Chicago, I was required to take philosophy, maths, history, sciences, and four rigorous courses in English that made me read across cultures (the stories of Akutagawa and D.H. Lawrence, Marquez and Achebe)—to read across time (Machiavelli and Madariaga, Rizal and Homer)—and to read across disciplines. I noted that just as at the UP in my time, the University of Chicago does not stint its students—my daughter was required to do the full two years of humanities reading before she did her majors, reading Hegel and Homer as a freshman and sophomore, as I was asked to do in Diliman. In my case, much of the knowledge that has stayed with me came in one packet (Dadufalza’s primer). The way UP taught its students to think then remains an incalculable benefit, equal to the best in America.

I repeat: I learned to think at UP, and the General Education curriculum made me into a novelist. It made me into a writer who can hold her own anywhere. It distresses me to think that the university will fail even one child, one student from the provinces, like me, who arrives at the university not knowing exactly who she could be—but now without the bulwark of its tough and extended humanities curriculum to point her to the myriad possibilities that creates not only engineers but also artists, not only scientists but also philosophers. The rigorous General Education program of UP is a boon to the country.

UP should strengthen its GE curriculum, not reduce it.

Please let me know how we, alumni across the world, can help to strengthen our alma mater. We love UP, we love our education, we would love to help.

Gina Apostol, AB English 1984

 

 

Penman No. 221: Teaching the Millennials

Posted on by
Reply

L1090932.JPG

Penman for Monday, October 17, 2016

 

 

THERE WERE no marching bands, greeting cards, or fireworks to mark the event, but World Teachers’ Day was celebrated last October 5. As unofficial or secular holidays like Mothers’ or Grandparents’ Day go, it’s a relatively new one, proclaimed by UNESCO in 1994 to draw attention to the key role teachers play in molding the citizens of every country. My calendar shows that I did nothing remarkable that Wednesday, my day off from teaching, so I very likely spent it on a foot-massage-movie-and-dinner date with Beng. But surely teaching would have crossed my mind, as it does every day, because we keep preparing for our next class even in our idle hours, wondering how we can make our students’ encounters with us more interesting and memorable.

I’ve been thinking about teaching a lot more lately, first because of the recent deaths of some valued mentors and colleagues. Just over the past month, our department lost two of its stalwarts—Professors Sylvia Ventura and Magelende “May” Flores. I’ve written quite a bit in this corner about Sylvia, my Shakespeare teacher, who fired up my enthusiasm for Elizabethan drama and poetry. May was an English-language specialist and textbook author, a sweet, imperturbable lady with a caring smile for everyone. (Continuing the tradition, May’s son Emil also teaches with the department and has become one of our prime experts on science fiction and creative nonfiction.)

The second reason is my own impending retirement, less than three years hence. It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than three decades since I gave up my PR job at a government agency to devote the rest of my life—as I told myself then—to studying, writing, and teaching. I never did become much of a scholar—I guess I did become the writer I wanted to be—but even this close to the end of an active career, the teacher in me is still a work in progress.

That’s because every teaching day is a new performance, even if—like it would be for a theater actor—the script may essentially be the same for courses you’ve taught for years. Every new batch of students brings with it a new mix of challenges—even, over the decades, a generational drift to adjust to. For example, a teacher can’t simply blame millennials for their lack of a historical memory, which we helped create; I try to get them interested in the past not for the past’s sake, but to show them how an appreciation of the past can help their future.

Teachers, in other words, have to keep learning about their students and their interests, so lessons remain fresh and relevant, rather than boring incantations regurgitated from ages past. We need to relate the lesson to the student’s present realities, which may seem daunting if you’re talking about, say, a 19th-century short story about the French bourgeoisie, but which can be done with a little imagination (in this case, I’d begin by talking about the Filipino middle class and its aspirations—“Where do you see yourself ten years from now?”).

But as vital as it is to connect directly with millennials, it’s just as important to remind them that there are many things in this world that may seem to have little or nothing to do with them that will still affect their lives—in other words, that we’re still motes in the grand scheme of things, and that Nature can be profoundly indifferent to our noisome plaints and woes.

That’s a harder lesson to impart, even to older students—to any person who hasn’t encountered something much larger than himself or herself, like a World War, or martial law, or a terrorist attack. In a me-centered universe, no one wants to feel disempowered, so I then have to challenge them into getting out of themselves and enlarging the sphere of personal actions they can take to improve not only their own future, but also that of their fellowmen.

Back when we ourselves were freshmen and sophomores in the early 1970s, this message came down to us in the exhortatory slogan “Serve the people!” Exactly how seemed a lot simpler to figure out back then, when a predatory dictatorship was looming over everything and everyone (a dreadful specter I thought I’d escaped forever). Today a young person’s options are far richer and more complex, with all manner of personal advocacies, NGOs, weekend CSR programs, and Facebook groups competing for one’s political attention.

But whatever the chosen means may be, the overriding need for building empathy remains, for leading young urban, middle-class Filipinos to see, to appreciate, and to grow their stake in a future that they share with the millions of others who live unlike them, many without the opportunities that they enjoy. We can’t truly be a nation—much less a Christian one—if we continue to dismiss the bullet-riddled bodies of the poor as trash because we find nothing in common with them.

A teacher’s job is to help students draw the line between two points, including and especially the most seemingly disparate ones. That includes the line between teacher and student, between student and student, and between student and society. If that’s all I’ve done these past three decades, I can retire happy.

 

 

AND NOW for something liberative. According to the exhibit notes, “Ebarotika! (You are Erotic, Eve) follows the story of Eve who dared venture into the forbidden. Her defiant act opened knowledge’s connection with sexuality, the knowledge of one’s sexual and erotic desire. But it also resulted in shame and punishment. Thus, many of us cover and hide our sexual and erotic life. Those who are bold enough to come into the open are subjected to stigma, discrimination, and death. Sexuality and the erotic are a source of life, joy, and pleasure. They are not objects of fear, horror, and anxiety. They must be opened, shared, and celebrated instead of being censored, concealed, and criminalized.”

Curated by Lia Torralba, Ebarotika! features 19 Kasibulan artists: Yasmin Almonte, Lot Arboleda, Chie Cruz, Cecil de Leon Escobar, Imelda Cajipe Endaya, Anna Fer, Lorna Fernandez, Kristin Garanchon, Lorna Israel, Amihan Jumalon, Nina Libatique, Eden Ocampo, Jonabelle Operio, Fel Plata, Rebie Ramoso, Benay Reyes, Doris Rodriguez, Christine Sioco, and Lia Torralba.

It opened last Saturday, but will run until November 23 at the Sining Kamalig Art Gallery located on the Upper Ground Floor of Ali Mall in Cubao, Quezon City. See you there!